Bethlehem

BETHLEHEM

BY

FREDERICK WILLIAM FABER

ECCB DEUS MAGNUS VINCENS SCIENTIAM
NOSTRAM I NUMB R US ANNORUM EJUS
INjESTIMABILIS.—JOB XXXVI. 26.

LONDON :

BURNS OATES & WASHBOURNE LTD.

Publishers to the Holy See.

MADB AND PWNXBO IN GREAt BRItAIN

THIS TREATIBB
ON THE SACKED INFANCY

OF OUR MOST DEAR AND BLESSED REDEEMER

IS LAID,

WITH THE MOST TENDER DEVOTION,

THE MOST HUMBLE CONFIDENCE,

AND

THE MOST REVERENTIAL WORSHIP,

AT THE FEET OF

SAINT JOSEPH,

THE SPOUSE OF MARY,
AND

THE GREAT FOSTER-FATHER OF OUR LORD.

a 2

PREFATORY EPISTLE

REV. WILLIAM ANTONY HUTCHISON,

PRIEST OF THE LONDON ORATORY.

My dear Father Antony, — Six years ago it seemed
natural to me to cast what I had to say in the way
of Preface to " Growth in Holiness " into the shape
of a Prefatory Epistle to you ; so much and so affec-
tionately were you mixed up with the past life and
the past experience which that Book represented.
It seems still more natural now, that I should do
the same in the case of " Bethlehem."

For this Book not only represents a past in which
you are as much mixed up as with that other past
six years ago, but, by God's appointment, it calls up
associations, which, if they are less joyous, are on
that very account more tender. That Will of God,
which has laid you aside and given you, apparently
for life, only pain and endurance for your portion in
the work of His vineyard, has disappointed many
hopes and frustrated many schemes, which were more
dear to us than strangers can ever understand. Yet
I trust that neither of us have, even so much as in
thought, rebelled against it.

viil PRE FA TOR Y EPISTLE.

Your pilgrimage to the East did not — so God willed
it ! — restore the health which you had lost in His
service, and which, I have a right to say, was of even
more value to me than to yourself. Neither has it
pleased Him to give you the strength necessary to
turn your journey to account in a literary way, for
the good of His Church or the illustration of His
Word. But much of this Book is yours. To you
is owing all that is correct and accurate and pictorial
about the scenes which it describes. It gives the
Book a sort of sad value to me, to think that it is,
with all its incompleteness, the only record of your
painstaking visit to the Holy Places.

Moreover, where the imagery bears upon itself so
many traces of the lochs of the Clyde, and the moun-
tains of Argyll, it is pleasant to me to remember that
the images are common to us both: for, after your
long absence, we were first together, in the kind and
hospitable seclusion of Ardencaple.

The various ways of dividing or regarding the Life
of our Blessed Lord have always interested you with
a peculiar interest, and have indeed occupied you not
a little. You sent me from the Holy Land a scheme
of narrating His Life, in connection with the topography
of Palestine, Egypt, and the Desert, which I once fondly
hoped you would have been allowed to execute. I
will now tell you what it is that I proposed to myself
in this Book.

There are several ways in which we may treat of
the mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years of our
dearest Lord. We may look at each of them singly
as it is in itself, full of grace and beauty, and dis-
tinctively unlike any other. Secondly, we may

PREFATORY EPISTLE, ix

gather them up into departments, and call them
the joyful, the sorrowful, and the glorious mysteries,
the three sets differing thus from each other, and, in
the unity of each set, each mystery having its own
distinctness. Or, thirdly, we may view them as
clustering in constellations, and yet these constella-
tions unities, as the Childhood, the Hidden Life, the
Public Ministry, the Passion, and the Eisen Life or
Great Forty Days. Each of these constellations has
a more perfect unity than the divisions of mysteries
according to their joyous, sorrowful, or glorious char-
acter, while at the same time the single mysteries,
which compose the unities, have also a greater variety.
Fourthly, we have much to learn by putting out of view
the separate mysteries, and studying the contrasts and
comparisons of those five constellations one with
another. It is hard to say whether their analogies or
diversities are the most full of theology and devotion.

The following Treatise is a specimen of the third
method of considering the Thirty- Three Years, united,
where it was naturally suggested, with the fourth. In
my own mind, probably from a poetical habit of
localising things, I have become accustomed to know
those Five Constellations of Mysteries by the names
of Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Calvary, and Gen-
nesareth, names which will be seen at once to be only
approximately true, yet sufficiently so for my pur-
pose.

I must also warn you, and through you my readers,
that there are parts of the Treatise liable to be mis-
understood without the reading of the whole. In
all other respects it will explain itself, and I confide
it to your indulgence and theirs, praying our Blessed

X PREFATORY EPISTLE.

Lord, if He sees fit, to allow it to quicken and brighten
the fires of Christmas in child-like hearts.

I cannot conclude without saying, that I feel a
kind of unseasonableness and incongruity in publish-
ing a Book just now. The Church is in deep afflic-
tion; and devotion to the Church ought to be no-
where a more absorbing passion than in the hearts
of St. Philip's sons. The Vicar of Christ is in cruel
distress, which is not the less painful to his children
because it is far from being without parallel in the
annals of the Papacy ; and those, who own a special
obedience to the Saint whom the Church has canonised
as the apostle of Home, cannot have other than bleed-
ing hearts when our holy Father is wearing so mani-
festly his Crown of Thorns. This Year — blessed be
God, it is drawing to its close ! — has had more than
its fair share of sorrow both within and without It
has been a year strewn with losses, as the wrecks
strew the angry sea. Nay, even at this hour, both
to you and to me, and indeed to our Brothers no
less than to ourselves, it is another tender and most
sacred association, that I am writing to you from
this house, and on this Feast of Saint Catherine,
the Egyptian martyr, and the dear Saint of Sinai

Ever, my dear Father Antony,

Most affectionately yours,

Feed. W. Fabkr.

Arundel Castle,

Feast op St. Catherink,

i86cx

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER ..... I

CHAPTER II.

THE BOSOM OF MARY ......,, 48

CHAPTER III.

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE I03

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS 163

CHAPTER V.

THE INFANT GOD 22?

CHAPTER VI.

SOUL AND BODY 277

xii CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.

PAOB

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME ....»•• 335

CHAPTER VIll.

HEAVEN ALREADY . • . 395

CHAPTER IX.

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER . . • • • 4^3

BETHLEHEM.

CHAPTER I.

THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

Jesus Christ yesterday, and to-day, and the same for ever I
These words of the Apostle express at once the noblest and
the most delightful occupation of our lives. To think, to
speak, to write perpetually of the grandeurs of Jesus, —
what joy on earth is like it, when we think of what we owe
to Him, and of the relation in which we stand to Him?
Who can weary of it 1 The subject is continually growing
before our eyes. It draws us on. It is a science the fascina-
tion of which increases the more deeply we penetrate into
its depths. That which is to be our occupation in eternity
usurps more and more with sweet encroachments the length
and breadth of time. Earth grows into heaven, as we come
to live and breathe in the atmosphere of the Incarnation.
Jesus makes heaven, wherever He is, whether it be in the
tabernacle, or in the heart of the communicant, just as He
took the Beatific Vision with Him into limbus when He
died, and turned the pensive shadows of the patriarchs' home
into the full glow of heaven.

But the contemplation of His grandeurs is not merely a
joy. It is something beyond an ennobling occupation. It
does an actual work in our souls, and a work which the

▲

2 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

grace of perseverance can make immortal. Rigoleuc has
well said, " It is sufficient to look on Jesus, and to contem-
plate His perfections and His virtues. The very view is of
itself capable of producing marvellous effects upon the soul,
just as a simple look at the brazen serpent, which Moses
reared in the wilderness, was enough to heal the bite of the
serpents. For everything in Jesus is not only saintly, but
sanctifying also, and imprints itself on the souls which
apply themselves to the consideration of it, if they do so
with good dispositions. His humility makes us humble;
His purity purifies us; His poverty, His patience. His
sweetness and His other virtues imprint themselves on those
who contemplate them. This may take place without our
reflecting at all upon ourselves, but simply by our viewing
these virtues in Jesus with esteem, admiration, respect, love,
and complacency." * Let it be with this hope that we now
draw nigh to Bethlehem to study the mysteries of His
Sacred Infancy. Love labours under the sweet impossibility
of ever comprehending the majesty of our dearest Saviour.
We shall see more at Bethlehem than we can understand ;
and even what we cannot understand will fill us full of love,
and it is love which makes us wise unto salvation.

There are two ways in which we can look at the mys-
teries of the Thirty-Three Years. We can either examine
each mystery by itself, as it is revealed to us in the Gospels,
or we can arrange the mysteries in classes, representing
certain divisions of our Lord's life. Thus Bethlehem,
Nazareth, Galilee, Calvary, and Gennesareth will stand for
His Infancy, His Hidden Life, His Public Ministry, His
Passion, and His Risen Life ; and each of them will repre-
sent many events under one head. Bethlehem will comprise
the actions aud sufferings of twelve years, and contain
within itself the Desert, Egypt, a sojourn at Nazareth, and
* Rigoleuc, L'Homme d'Oraison, p. 35.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 3

mysteries, the scene of which was in Jerusalem. So
Nazareth represents eighteen years, and Galilee three, while
Calvary occupies barely three days, and Gennesareth forty. At
the same time the groups of mysteries represented by these
names have each of them a unity of their own. Hence it
comes to pass that we may also contemplate them in two
ways. For instance, we may either study the Passion by
taking its several mysteries in succession, and feeding our
souls on each of them by itself, or we may regard the
Passion as in effect one mystery, complete in itself, and in a
certain sense indivisible, and its different actions and suffer-
ings as various disclosures of its unity.

It is in this last way that I propose to consider our Lord's
Sacred Infancy. We may regard the first twelve years as
forming one mystery, with a character and spirit of its own,
quite distinguishable from the character and spirit of the
Hidden Life or of the Public ^Ministry. The different sub-
ordinate mysteries, which it contains, have all the same
stamp upon them, and are congenial to each other. There
is no need to compare these two methods of handling our
Lord's mysteries. I have not chosen one rather than the
other, because it was better than the other. They are quite
distinct. Perhaps the method I have selected mingles more
doctrine with our devotion, and so has unconsciously
attracted me. It is less common than the other method,
and so leads us into less repetition. Bethlehem is a most
beautiful and inviting subject, well worthy of the exclusive
contemplation of a long life. We have to penetrate into
the Bosom of the Eternal Father, and shading our eyes as
we best can, to behold the everlasting generation of the
Word. The Bosom of Mary has to be to us, as it was to
Him, an " ivory Palace " of unspeakable delights. The cave
at Bethlehem and the courts of Sion, the sands of the
wilderness and the green Nile-bank, the bazaars of Helio-

4 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

polis and the sequestered fields of Nazareth, angels singing
in mid-air, shepherds watching, the three kings journeying
by the star, the piteous cries of the innocents and the wail-
ing of their inconsolable mothers, Mary and Joseph, Simeon
and Anna, the rustics of Nazareth and the doctors of
Jerusalem, — these have to occupy us in turn, as the scenes
or the actors in ravishing mysteries, which light up for us
the deep places in the character of God, and most intimately
concern ourselves and our own salvation.

The Sacred Infancy is a world of its own. It is not
indeed a creation apart, for none of God's creations are
creations apart. They are parts of a whole. Yet there is
this peculiarity in the world of the Sacred Infancy, that the
fountain of all creation rises there. It is the home of the
predestination of Jesus, the land of His eternal beginnings
in the mind of God. It does not commence with the angelic
salutation at Nazareth. It runs up into eternity. It begins
with the beginnings of Jesus, and runs down to the twelfth
year after His temporal generation. The Babe of Bethlehem
lies in the Bosom of the Father on high, and is the cause
there of all creation, and its model as well as its cause. We
cannot detach His earthly childhood from these heavenly
beginnings; for without them it would be unintelligible.
It is a beautiful land to traverse, more wonderful than the
regions childhood dreams of in its inarticulate poetry, as
lying somewhere beyond the gates of the golden sunset.
The reasons of the Creator for having a creation, the pre-
parations of the Creator for His entry into His own creation,
the unexpected method of His coming, the beauty, spiritual,
intellectual, and artistical, of His mysterious demeanour, the
Immutable mutably adapting Himself to the condition of a
weak, mute, mortal childhood, — these are the wonders that
throng our path through that divine land which we are now
venturing to explore. We shall learn most of them by being

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. t

simple with them ; and we must be patient and attentive
with the difficulties; for some difficulties there must be.
At the least we shall love God a degree better at the end of
our task, and one fresh degree of love for Him is worth many
martyrdoms; and with this hope and this conviction we
will begin.

Whom shall we ask to go with us in our journey ? Who
shall be to us the doctor of the Sacred Infancy 1 Surely St.
Joseph, 80 near to the Infant Jesus, so dear to His sinless
Mother ! If ever Saint was penetrated with the spirit of
Bethlehem, doubtless it was he. Before the toil of the
Public Ministry began, before the shadows of the Passion
had begun to thicken palpably on the horizon, St. Joseph
had finished his vocation. He belonged to Bethlehem and
Nazareth; and God took him when Nazareth was ending.
Ho lay in the contented tranquillity of Abraham's bosom,
while Jesus was drinking His cup of sorrow, and Mary was
bearing her broken heart about with her through the crowded
mysteries of those three eventful years. The spirit of the
Sacred Infancy is, as it were, his whole sanctification. No
one can tell us more than he can of the young Mother's
heart, and of the Heart of the Divine Child. So we must
entreat him to go with us, and to help our prayers for light,
and to surround us with the atmosphere of his own meek and
meditative spirit ; and we too must remember his presence,
even when we do not mention him, so that our very thoughts
and words may unawares be impregnated with the odour of
his fragrant soul.

When the lark mounts up to heaven to sing its morning
hymn, the sounds of labour and the cries of earth, the low-
ing of the cattle, the rushing of the waters, and the rustling
of the leaves, grow fainter and fainter as the bird rises in
the air. The wind waves the branches of the trees, but to
the bird they wave noiselessly. The morning breeze benda

6 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

the silvery side of the uncut grass, where its nest lies hid,
til! the whole field rises and falls in green and white waves,
like the shallows of the sea ; but it is all a silent show. No
sound reaches the secluded bird in that region of still sun-
shine, where he is pouring out those glorious hymns, of
which we catch only either the prelude as he soars or the
last precipitate fragments as he falls to earth from out his
shrine of light. So is it with us in prayer, when we rise
above our own wants or the outcries of our temptations, and
soar in self-forgetting adoration towards the throne of God
hidden in light inaccessible. The sounds of earth go first of
all Then the waving soundless show seems fixed, and still
and motionless, and diminished. Next it melts into a con-
fused faint-coloured vision, and soon it lies below in a blue
mist, like land uncertainly descried at sea. Then, last of
all, the very attraction of earth seems gone, and our soul
shoots upward, as if, like fire, its centre was above and not
below. Thus must it be with us now : for we have to rise
to the Bosom of the Eternal Father,

St. Joseph is kneeling by the Child in the cave of Beth
lehem. Let us draw near, and kneel there with him, and
follow his thoughts afar off. It is but an hour since that
Babe was bom into the world, and gladdened Mary's eyes
with the divine consolations of His Face. It is but nine
months since He was incarnate in the inner room at Nazareth.
Yet neither Nazareth nor Bethlehem were His beginnings.
He was eternal years old the moment He was born. Time,
which had already lived through such long cycles, and had
perhaps endured through huge secular epochs before the
creation of man, was younger by infinite ages than the Babe
of Bethlehem. The creation of the angels, with the beauty
and exultation of their first graces, the orderly worship of
their hierarchies, their mysterious trial, the dreadful fall of
one third of their number, and Michael's battle with the

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 7

rebels, lie dim and remote beyond the furthest mists of
human history. Yet the Babe of Bethlehem is older far
than that. Indeed it was around Him that all angelic history
was grouped. He was at once their Creator and the pattern
after which they were created, the fall of those who fell, and
the perseverance of those who stood. Hereafter He will
spend a three years' Ministry in Galilee and among the towns
of Judah and Benjamin; yet, in truth, all the history of
man's world, from the times of paradise to the hour of the
Immaculate Conception, had been His Ministry. He preached
before the flood. He gave His benediction to the tents of
the patriarchs. He imparted grace, and saved souls, and
wrought miracles, in Jewry and in heathendom for some
thousands of years. But now by the sand-glasses of men He
is one hour old.

This one of the heavenly bodies, which we tenant, was
created to be as it were the garden, the Eden, of His Incar-
nation ; and He adorned it in His love, before Adam, the
first copy of Him, lived among its Asiatic shades. Perhaps
it lay for ages in the glad sunshine, solitary, silent, in beauti-
ful desolation, and He took complacence in the adorning of
it. He loved perchance to see its beauty ripen, rather than
to rise up at once complete. Continents sank slowly at His
will, and new oceans rolled above their mountain tops, or
elevated steppes. New lands rose out of the bosom of the
deep. Floras of marvellous foliage waved in the sun, and
the wisdom and the joy of the Babe of Bethlehem was in
them. Faunas, strange, gigantic, terrible, possessed the
waters and the land, of His fashioning, and for the delight
of His glory. The central fires wrought beautifully and
delicately the metals and the gems, which were for the altars
of the Babe of Bethlehem, for the tiara of His Vicar, or the
chasubles of His priests. The rocks and marbles ripened on
the planet, as the fruits ripen on a tree j and the Babe, the

8 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

Wisdom of the Father, disported Himself in the vast opera-
tion, the pacific uniformity, and the magnificent slowness of
His own laws. The grandeur of those huge-leaved trees, the
unwieldy life of those extinct monsters, the loveliness of
now sunken lands, were all for Him who has just now been
bom in Bethlehem, and were not only for Him, but were
also His own doing.

Bethlehem then was not His first home. "We must seek
Him in an eternal home if indeed He be older than the
angels, the eldest-born of creatures. The dark cave within
and the moonlit slope without are not like the scenery of
His everlasting home. He is the Eternal Word. He is the
first Word ever spoken, and He was spoken by God, and He
is in all things equal to Him by whom He was spoken. He
was uttered from eternity, uttered without place to utter
Him in, without sound accompanying the utterance, and the
Father who uttered Him, or rather who is for ever uttering
Him, is not prior to the Word He utters. His home has no
scenery, no walls, no shape, no form, no colour, no spot
which can be loved with a local love. It is not in space,
nor in imaginary space, nor within the world, nor at the
world's edge, nor beyond it. It is the Bosom of the Father
It is amid the unlocalised fires of the Godhead. There, in
the white light, inaccessible through the brilliance of its
whiteness, we confusedly discern the magnificence of a
Divine Person. He is unbegotten. He is not a word whom
any one could utter ; for there is no one to utter Him, and
He is besides adorably unutterable. He is not a Breath
breathed forth of divine love ; for there were none whose
mutual love could breathe Him forth, and He is besides
adorably unproceeding. The Word expresses Him, not
because He utters Him, but because He is uttered by Him.
The Holy Spirit is His fiery Breath, the Breath of the
Father and the Son, coequal with Them both, but with no

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. c,

procession from His blessed Self. This Divine Person,
whom we confusedly discern, is like a Fountain, a fountain
of golden light flowing with uncreated waters. Yet the
Fountain is not a fountain without its waters, and the waters
are coeval with the fountain. Out of Him flows the Son ;
from Him and from His "Word proceeds the Holy Ghost, all
coequal, coeternal, consubstantiaL Yet He is the First
Person, and gloriously without superiority or precedence.
He is the sole Fountain of Godhead, yet it is the very glory
of the Fountain that its double streams are coequal with
itself. He in His adorable sublimity is the unsent insepar-
able Companion of the Two Divine Persons who are sent
and who send Themselves. Him, without figure, we picture
to ourselves amid those unlocalised fires. Him, without
images, we discern in the breathlessness of our far-seeing
faith. Him, without light, we behold in the darkness of
His blinding majesty. Him, in His outstretched immensity,
we compass in the fondness of our adoring love. Him, in
His nameless incomprehensibility, we sweetly understand
in the knowledge that we are His sons. His Bosom, an
abyss of unfathomable beauty, the shrine of unruffled peace,
the furnace of the divine beatitude, is the home of the Babe
of Bethlehem, His only native place.

Unbeginning is the life in that paternal Bosom. Yet
what do we mean by unbeginning 1 It is a thought we can-
not think, too real a reality to be other than a mere word to
finite creatures like ourselves. It is good to try to stretch
ourselves to its height and breadth; for there is no resi
equal to the weariness that comes of striving to embrace the
thought of God. In that Bosom the Divine Person, who is
the Babe of Bethlehem, was bom, who yet never began to
be bom, and has never done being born. Never was the
Unbegotten Father with the unborn Son. Unbegotten and
eternally begotten ! what but faith shaU distinguish between

10 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

the two?— faith, or the vision which is faith's crown here-
after 1 As there never was a time when the Son was yet
unborn, so can there never be a time when He will cease
being born. It is in eternity, and not in time, that His
inexplicable Generation finds room. He proceeds from the
Father by way of generation. He proceeds from the under-
standing of the Father. He is the Father's understanding of
Himself, or rather He is produced by it. He is the expres-
sion of all the Father's perfections. He is not merely the
similitude of the Father, because He is something more.
He is con substantial with Him. Yet He is not identical
with the Father, because He is a distinct Person from Him.
The Father knows Himself, and by His knowledge of Him-
self the Son is born amid the splendours of uncreated holiness,
amid the inconceivable jubilations of the divine perfections.
Thus the Generation of the Son is not a mystery done and
over. It was not an event at some remote point before ever
time was. That which is eternal must always be going on.
That which can end must have begun. We must be careful
therefore always to bear in mind that the coequal, coeternal
Son is ever being begotten in the Bosom of the Father, at
this moment as well as from forever. There was no moment
when He was not begotten, no moment when He is not being
begotten, no place through all the amplitudes of omnipresence
in which His eternal Generation is not for ever going on,
close to us, or far away from us, outside us in outward space,
inside us in the noiseless centre of our souls. Yet nowhere
is the silence broken by that stupendous utterance of the
Father. The omnipresent Word does not so much as vibrate
on the air, when He rushes forth with the irresistible might
of the Godhead. The clangour of His omnipotence is unheard.
His all-embracing light coruscates through the quiet night,
and the darkness remains calm and still, like the plumage of
a sleeping bird. Oh how can we ever find a home where we

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. il

are out of sight and hearing of that Utterance of the Father 1
See how the spirits of angels and the blessed souls of men
throng in, all day and night, to witness that eternal utterance,
to bathe in its beatific light, and to be enchanted with its
spiritual sound ! This is the true birth of that Babe of
Bethlehem, for ever older than the hill on which Bethlehem
is built, for ever younger than the blossom of the wild thyme
which opened its pink eye this morning on the green sward,
where the sheep were lying when the angels sang in heaven.
Unutterably blessed is the life within that Bosom of the
Father. For while the Father is for ever uttering His
eternal Word, He and the Word are for ever breathing forth
the Holy Ghost, the uncreated fire of Their mutual love and
boundless jubilee, a Person distinct from Themselves, yet as
it were the bond of the Two, coequal, coeternal with Them,
the Term of God, the Limit of the Illimitable, so that God,
penetrating His whole creation, is not commingled nor con-
fused with things. Such are the immutable necessities of
the Divine Life, the inevitable uncreated productions of its
understanding and its will, the twofold pulse of Generation
And Procession, the beating Heart of that exhaustless sea of
Being, with Persons more distinct than any distinctions
among creatures, and yet with a Unity which transcends all
the identities of earth. Who can think of such a sanctuary,
and yet not tremble with excess of love ? Who can fix his
eye of prayer upon it, and yet not tremble with excess of
fear, lest haply he should miss of its unending vision ? It
was in that deep recess of an incalculable eternity that the
Babe of Bethlehem dwelt, before He vouchsafed to take
visible possession of the Cave of Bethlehem. It is there
that we must seek His beginnings, which began not : it is
thence we must date the pedigree of the Eternal, who has
no ancestry : it is in the light of that darkness that we must
search Bethlehem and Nazareth, Egypt and the Wilderness,

12 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

to learn the mysteries of that mortal Childhood of the Eternal
Word. Deep in our souls can we not see that Bosom of the
Father 1 Yet it is beautiful beyond thought, adorable beyond
the stretch of created spirit. Created things give us no
parallels : they furnish us with no images : the poetry of
earth is but a distraction : the definitions of the faith only
catch us as we fall. Yet somehow we see that Bosom of the
Father deep within ourselves, and it is familiar to us as a
household sanctuary. We know that with all its immeasur-
able capacity of the divine life it is actually within ourselves,
and we hold our breath, and seem to faint away upon it in
sweetest trance of helpless love.

What manner of life was it which the Word led in the
Bosom of the Father? It was a creatureless life. There
were no creatures, except in the purposes and decrees' of
the divine mind, and in the inexhaustible storehouses of
the divine wisdom. God had always determined to create,
because He was always love, and love craved more room,
if we may dare so to speak of Him who is infinitely self-
sufficient, for the exuberant generosity of His justice as well
as for the incredible fertility of His wisdom. It is the
justice of creation, which makes it so loving a mystery.
Time is an old creation, the most ancient of all creations.
We look upon the myriads of many-circled ages, as on a
vast ocean, which stretches out of sight, and is lost in the
haze on the horizon when the angels came into being,
together with the elements of the material creation. Yet
the furthest age spends its biUows on the shore of time,
infinitely short of the creatureless life of the Word in the
Bosom of the Father. The Ages seemed like a help to the
comprehension of the Unbeginning ; but they play us false,
and only puzzle us the more. How can a life be otherwise
than indescribable to us creatures who live on matter and
know by images, when it was a life without world, without

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 13

time, without place, without motion, without fixedness,
without parallels, without comparisons, without similitudes,
almost without shadows. Only in each vast department of
creation, in each huge epoch of time, part of the shadow of
that divine life lies for our tracing; yet, like a village at
the mountain-foot, all creation lies in the shadow, but the
shadow of the peak overshoots it, and is cast far beyond.
Its bliss was in its unity : but, unlike created unities, it
was free from the imperfection of solitude. It was the
simplicity of one boundless life in the pacific jubilant com-
panionship of Three distinct Persons. There was no hier-
archy among the Persons ; so that the imperfection of
superiority did not attach to the Father any more than
the infirmity of subordination to the Holy Ghost or to the
Son. The distinctness of the Persons only enhanced the
unity of the Godhead, because the Persons were unspeak-
ably coequal

It was a life of infinite complacency. God rested in Him-
self. In Himself His infinity was satisfied. The immensity
of His own perfections lay before Him, and He traversed
them, so to speak, with His blessed understanding. To
know Himself infinite by His infinite knowledge was to be
infinitely blissful. The imperfection of our human words
is such, that we cannot speak of God without seeming to
divide Him. "We must therefore bear the adorable simpli-
city of God in mind, while we thus discourse of the abysses
of His divine life. It cannot be too often repeated that
God has not many several attributes, nor even one : but He
is simply God. He is not different from His perfections,
nor are His perfections, strictly speaking, difi'erent from each
other. He is Himself infinite perfection in manifold sim-
plicity. He is what He is, a simple act, God. But we
may conceive of Him as thus reposing in unutterable tran-
quillity upon His knowledge of Himsell We may imagine

14 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

all His perfections to which theology has given cognisable
names. Each one of them would give out to us multiplied,
or rather immeasurable wisdom, many sciences, many divine
theologies, many rapturous contemplations. There were
oceans of His own being in whose deeps He could become
divinely entranced. The very comprehension of Himself,
which no possible creature could share, was in itself unutter-
able bliss. There are also doubtless many perfections in
Him, for which our created natures furnish no analogies,
and for whicli therefore we have no name ; and each of
these was a fresh infinity for the embrace of His jubilant
self- com prehension. The simplicity of act, which charac-
terised this illimitable self-comprehension, was most of all
a delight beyond our imaginations. Here we must worship,
for we must cease to reason or to pourtray. Even thought
here is silent and formless. The confused thought of God
must fill our vacant minds. There is more light in the
indistinctness of that thought than in the clearest vlemon-
strations of human science.

The life in the Bosom of the Father was also a life of
love, but of such love as passes our limited comprehension.
Even created love is a very world of delights, and in one
or other of its many departments it is the sunshine of life.
It can bear the pressure of time, and not give way. It caE
outlive wrong. It is mightier than death. It can change
darkness to light. But, if love has all these prerogatives
among men, where it is so debased by its alliance with
matter, how grand must be its empire among the pure and
intellectual angels ! With what spotless fires must it not
burn in their magnificent intelligences ! How many name-
less species of transcending love must not those various
species of glorious spirits know ! We can hardly picture to
ourselves angelic love, except as something fabulously bright
and inexpressibly wonderful. We can think of the love of

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. i$

a Seraph as all fire, the love of a Cherub as resplendent
light, or the love of a Throne as deepest living peace,
stability and force combined : for it is to the choir of
Thrones that God has given the most special communication
of His attribute of eternity. But what can we think of the
angelic life of a thousand loves, so various because of their
numbers and their kinds, so simple because of the uncom-
plicated excellence of their keen intelligence 1 Yet all this
is nothing to the love in the life of God. It is an ema-
nation from it, but infinitely diluted, a shadow of it, yet
not only faint and faithless, but fragmentary and partial
also.

Who can ever dream of the love of the Father and the
Son ? Who can see in the depth of his mind, even far
down among the thoughts which lie too deep for words,
how that Love proceeds from Them both for evermore 1
It is a procession of Uncreated Fire, the out-rolling of an
Uncreated Ocean, out-rolled beyond Themselves, yet within
the Bosom of the Godhead. It is a jubilee with none to
hear, the soundless thunder of eternal bliss beating on an
immaterial shore. It is, or rather He is, a Divine Person,
coequal with the Father and the Son, a person of unimagin-
able beauty, of incomprehensible sanctity, and of incom-
parable cognisable distinctness from the Other Two, who
cease not, and by necessity cannot cease, from actively
breathing Him forth for evermore. What companionship
also is there in that love ! Wliat exultation in the com-
pletion of the Godhead, which never was incomplete, never
without its complement in that Third Person, never
unlimited, but always illimitably what it is ! Then, while
the Holy Ghost is produced by the love of the Father and
the Son, there are the loves of all the Three Divine Persons
for each other, those twice three loves which are the six
pulses of the unity of God. Each Person has two loves, in

i6 THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

His love for the other Two ; and each of the two loves of
each of the Three Persons is simply a boundless world of
life, of wisdom, and of jubilation. What then must the
one love be, the single simple divine love, which is the
union of all these ? Could anything less adorably profound,
less unimaginably capacious than an illimitable Trinity of
Persons contain the vast waters of such an uncreated sea of
love, or anything less omnipotently simple than the Divine
Unity hold without breaking the everlasting pacific tempests
of such tremendous and impetuous love ?

What words we have heaped together! Yet we may
hope it has not been altogether without ideas. It is one of
the thoughts, beneath whose broad shadow all the nations of
the earth may gather and sit musing, that, while the sun is
shining, or the moon silvering the woods, or the noontide
being lulled to sleep by its own fragrances, or the river
lapsing down to the sea through tuneful groves and over
cattle-spotted plains, this wonderful divine life is going on
everywhere, close to us and far-off, in our own country and
in other lands, far above the empyrean heaven and down in
our own souls. It is a thought to make us very grave, that
this life of God holds us like a hand, penetrates us like a
sword, and knows nothing of the space which gives us room
or of the time which is flowing above our heads. As it has
been from all eternity, so is it now. It has found no new
place. Creation has not in any way displaced it. It has
undergone no modification. It has acquired nothing, expe-
rienced nothing. Its ungrowing magnificence is ever fresh
as the dawn, ever new as the first creation. It is always
the same, yet never monotonous. inimitably outspread
beyond all imaginary space, it is full, complete, intense, in
every point of space, at every point of time. A paradise
of intellectual delights, a boundless fire of uncreated loves,
an ocean of glad, wise, resistless being, it is glorious in its

THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER. 17

liberty and glorious in the grandeur of its necessities. It
is a silence of amazing colloquies, a sanctuary of restful joys,
a life of omnipotent and omnipresent simplicity, a unity of
Three distinct adorable Persons. Surely all creation is not
as a feather in comparison of this. How little, by the side
of this awful majestic life, are all the schemes of men, how
paltry their interests I How tame and tiresome seem the
political revolutions of earth, the greatest discoveries of
science, the most golden epochs of literature, when we think
of this omnipresent life of God! All human joys appear
but like the bursting of the foam-bells on the crest of the
wave, and all human sorrows but as the sighing of the
night- wind in the distant wood; and yst this vast life of
God compasses both the sorrows and the joys with tran-
quillest, watchfullest, minutest love. But to us they should
seem even smaller than they seem to God, because the
thought of the Infinite dwarfs aU things in our sight, and
ourselves also in our own estimation.

What a wonderful permission to us is the permission to
love God ! What then shall we say, when we consider that
we ourselves are to be admitted to the sight and enjoyment
of this life of God 1 It is the very end for which we were
created. Nay more, we ourselves have been in some sense,
as we shall see presently, part of that divine life. We have
been known and loved, up in those regions of eternity, in
those boundless tracts of uncreated being, before the birth
of time ; and it is our very destination to enter into the joy
of that exulting life, to see God as He is, and to live in end-
less companionship with Him. It is our incredible bliss to
be allowed to add one spark more to the glory, the outward
glory, of that blessed majesty. We can be one flash of
lightning more round the immensity of His throne, one
additional coruscation in the intolerable radiance of the
merciful crown which he vouchsafes to wear. Infinitely

iS THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

little as we are, we are, and it is our joy of joys to be so,
a fresh exercise to Him of His irresponsible sovereignty.
We are large enough to catch the light of His justice,
and be another place for it to shine upon. His mercy can
beautifully reflect itself even in the shallows of our tiny
souls. We can lie upon the shore of that exulting life, and
shine and glow and murmur while its bright waters wash
over us for ever. Oh beautiful destiny of men ! how happy
is our present, our future how much happier ! How happy
is our worship, how happy even the very fear with which
we work out a salvation so magnificent and so divine !

Such was the creatureless life which the Eternal Word
lived in the Bosom of the Father, creatureless yet not
creatureless. The Babe of Bethlehem was that Eternal
Person, and in some sense He was eternally the Babe of
Bethlehem. From the first. His predestined Humanity
entered into that divine life, or lay visibly upon its surface.
In the Fountain of the Godhead, as in a most pellucid
mirror, there was an eternal view of creatures, creatures which
should one day be, creatures perhaps of endlessly successive
creations, and creatures which were possible to infinite power
and inexhaustible wisdom, which yet should never actually
be. The knowledge of creatures, and especially the know-
ledge of His own Sacred Humanity, was part of that know-
ledge by which the Word was eternally produced. With
this eternal view of creatures, it seems a mystery that the
actual creation was so long delayed ; and yet eternity is not
time, and there was no delay. But creation is not eternal,
and thus had the creation of the angels, and of matter,
taken place millions of ages earlier than it did, in our
manner of speaking, it would truly have been no earlier, or
had it been only last year, it would truly have been no
later.* In both cases there would simply have been an

* TU© reader must bear in mi|id thftt it is so far the received doctri«#

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER, 15

Immeasurable and unsuccessive eternity before it. Some
epeak as if God humbled Himself out of the sublimity of
His divine life in order to create. Yet this can be but a
figure of speech. There can be no humility in God. God
could only touch lowliness through the assumption of a
created nature. Rightly considered, it is more honourable
even to the divine self-sufficing life of God to say, what is
the truth, that creation was worthy of Him, both the act of
creating and the actual creation. In God, what is free is
lower than what is necessary ; and creation was a free act
outside Himself, not a necessary act inside Himself, like the
Generation of the Son or the Procession of the Spirit. He
was not by His own nature bound to create, nor, when He
created, was He bound to do so after one fashion rather than
another, or with one degree of perfection rather than another.
Thus the glorious tracts of world-peopled space, and all the
sun-illumined beauty of the little world which we inhabit,
are nothing more than marvellous monuments of the liberty
of God visibly outspread before our eyes. It is part of our
own exultation in being creatures, that we are in ourselves
such a mass of evidences of the wonderful and attractive
things which there are in God.

What then was the first aspect of creation in the divine
mind, if we may use the word " first " of that which was
eternal? There may at least be a priority of order, even
though there be no priority of time. There is precedence in
decrees, even where there is not succession. The first aspect
of creation, as it lay in the mind of God, was a created
nature assumed to His own uncreated nature in a Divine
Person. In other words, the first sight in creation was the
Babe of Bethlehem. The first step outside of God, the first

of the Church that spirit and matter were created simultaneously, that
many theologians call it temerarious to teach the opposite doctrine since
the Lateran Council (in capite Firmiter),

20 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER,

Btanding-point in creation, is the created nature ass'imed to
a Divine Person. Through this, as it were, lay the passage
from the Creator to creatures. This was the point of union,
the junction between the finite and the infinite, the creature
blending unconfusedly with the Creator. This firstborn
creature, the Sacred Humanity, was not only the primal
creature — but it was also the cause of all other creatures
whatsoever. It was the central creature as well as the first.
All others group themselves around it, and are in relations
with it, and draw their significance from it, and moreover
are modelled upon it. Its predestination is the fountain of
all other predestinations. The whole meaning of creation,
equally with the destinies of each individual creature, is
bound up with this created Nature assumed to a Divine
Person. It is the head of creations, angelic, human, or
whatsoever other creation there may ever be. Its position
is universal ; for it couples all creations on to God.

But by which of the Three Divine Persons was this
created Nature to be assumed ? By the Second Person, the
"Word, who had been living everlastingly in the Bosom of
the Father the life we have been attempting to describe.
There were doubtless many reasons why it should be the
Second rather than the First or Third Persons, which are
beyond our comprehension or suspicion. We probably get
but a glance at any divine work, and there is radiance enough
to blind us in the single glance ; yet even so it is no measure
of the resplendent light of uncreated wisdom which is in the
least of the doings of the Most High. There are neverthe-
less certain conveniences, as theologians have named them,
certain congruities and fitnesses, in the assumption of a
created nature by the Son rather than by the Father or
the Holy Ghost, which we may reverently consider, and
which disclose to us somewhat more of the adorable life
of God.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 21

There is a special connection between the Word and
creatures, independent of the fact of His having assumed
a created nature, and which seems to be part of the reason
why He, not the other Two Persons, should have been the
One to assume it. As the Word, He is the utterance of the
Father, the expression of Him, the image of Him. Creation
is in a finite and created way what He is infinitely and
uncreatedly. Creation is a divine word, an utterance, an
expression, an image of God, faint, feeble, far-ofi", external,
mutable, free ; while the Word is the Image of God within
God, consubstantial, eternal, immutable, and necessary. We
venture to think it most probable that all creatures have
some distinct relations to the different Persons of the Holy
Trinity, and that the Trinity of God, as well as His Unity,
is impressed on His creatioa Nevertheless, quite apart
from this idea, there is a special connection between the
Son and creatures, as between the inward and the outward
Word of God. So that His assumption of a created nature
was the congruous way in which creation expressed itself.
It was the inward Word becoming outward. It was the
eternal generation followed by the temporal generation. If
we might dare to use such an expression, the assumption of
a created nature by the Word, was the way in which the
creatureless God vouchsafed to get at creation. He was as
it were necessitated to speak one Word, and that Word,
because necessary, could not be otherwise than coetemal and
consubstantial with Himself. In His love He freely spoke
a second Word, which was creation, and that Word, because
free, was finite and temporary. It was by His first Word
that He spoke His second Word. For creation is more than
an echo of the eternal generation of the Son, in the reality
of that created nature which the Son has stooped to wear.
Thus there is a congruity in the Son's assumption of a created
nature which there would not have been, at least in our in-

22 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

distinct vision of divine things, in a similar assumption by
the Father or the Holy Ghost.

But there is a second congruity, which may be evolved
out of the first. He is not the Word only ; He is the Son
also. In His relation of Son we discern another fitness for
His assumption of a created nature. He is the Son of God
by nature, and rational creatures were to be the sons of God
by adoption, through their justification. It was the end of
their creation that they were to be admitted to share in His
filiation. The communication of His Sonship was to be
their way into glory. As God appeared as if He entered
into creation through the Person of the Son, so through
the same Person does creation find its way to rest in God.
Hence it was fitting that the Second Person should be the
One to assume a created nature, in order that He might not
only be the Son of God in His divine nature, but also the
Son of God in His created nature. This second sonship*
He obtained through His created nature, through which also
He comes to be the Head of all God's adopted sons, the
Sonship of His created nature being the model and the cause
and the means of their adoption ; though its own Sonship
is natural and not adopted. This is a congruity founded
upon His being the Son as well as the Word.

If we are right in thus imagining that we discern these
two fitnesses in the Person of the Son for the assumption
of a created nature, when, which neither man nor angel could

♦ Constat in Chriato esse triplicem filiationem, aliam, qna, ut homo,
refertur ad Virginem, et est filius Yirginis : aliam sanctificationis naturalia
divin», qua, ut homo, refertur ad Deum, ut commune toti Trinitati, quae
est denominatio proveniens a natura et entitate divina : et tertiam, qoa,
ut Deus, refertur ad Patrera priraam Personam Trinitatis, et qua Christus,
ut homo, nequit referri, nee esse Filius. — Hurtado, xvii. diff. iii. But
see Siuri. De Novissimis, tract, xxxvi. cap. iL Beet. 33 ; and Bernal's
theory of a third kind of filiation, filiatio propria, qui modus filiationig
medius est inter filiationem naturalemet adoptivam. — Btmal. Delncarn.,
diiD. Ixv. sect. 4. This is to escape Suarez' two orders of natural filiation.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER: 23

have dreamed, it was to be that a Divine Person should
assume a created nature, we may also venture to behold
what looks like an incongruity in such an assumption taking
place by the Father or the Holy Ghost. By virtue of the
assumed nature, the Divine Person assuming it must become
the Son of God.* God's movement towards creation is
a movement of paternity; creation corresponds to that
movement of God by a filial worship and obedience. If a
Creator, who is not also the Father of His creatures, is con-
ceivable, the dispensation it would betoken would be so
entirely different from that under which the actual creation
finds itself, that the hypothesis would displace all our ideas,
and we could hardly arrange matters in an imaginary world
of this sort without doing some dishonour to those per-
fections of God which the bare act of creation would imply.
We take for granted, therefore, speaking of what we know
and see, and according to the analogy of present things, that,
in virtue of His assumed nature, the Person assuming would
become in the most sublime manner the actual Son of God
by nature rather than by adoption. Now there would be a
manifest incongruity, to our weak eyes at least, in the Father
becoming also the Son, even by means of a created nature. t
A temporal generation does not seem suitable to that Divine
Person, whose distinct perfection is His innascibility. There
would appear a sort of violence in the Unbegotten Father
being also the Babe of Bethlehem. So also in the case of
the Holy Ghost, the assumption of a created nature and a

• Si humanitas Ohristi unita fuisset hypostatice Patri aut Spiritui
Sancto, et non Filio, Christus ut homo esset eodem modo filiua naturalis
Dei, quia eodem modo esset natura conjunctus Deo, et habeas jus ad
vitam seternam. — Hurtado, De Incam., disp. xvii. diflf. iii.

t Durandus and some others taught that Christ as man is the adopted
Son of God, but St. Thomas, with Vasquez, Suarez, and others, will not
allow of this being taught. The reception of the Council of Frankfort
aeems to put it beyond doubt. Indeed there is a consent of the great
theologians against even saying that the Humanity was adopted bv G^^

24 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

temporal generation would not be in harmony with the
method of His proceeding from the Father and the Son,
which is not a Generation, but a Procession of another sort.
It has not the similitude of a Sonship, even though the
Person proceeding is consubstantial with Those from whom,
as from one principle, He eternally proceeds. He is fruitful
within the Godhead; for He is the Breath, the Fire, the
Love, the Jubilee of the divine life. He is fruitful outside,
for He is the Giver of gifts, and the Gift given, the unction
and outpouring of the Holy Trinity upon creation. Marvel-
lous both within and without the Godhead is His adorable
fecundity : but it is of a different sort from that of the Father
and the Son. He produces no Fourth Person in the God-
head. Now as there is something incongruous in the First
Person, as the unbegotten Fountain of Godhead, from whom
all paternity in heaven and earth is named, assuming a
created nature and becoming the adopted Son of God, so also
is there something unsuitable in the same assumption by the
Third Person, who is unproducing, and who returns back
upon the Father and the Son, the adorable Limit of the
Godhead. It seems as if it would not be at the limit, but
in the centre, that God would open on creation. At least
all this is what seems to us now that we know things as
they actually are. May God forgive us, if we have thought
too boldly ! It is such a delight to speak of Him, that we
are sometimes beguiled onwards we hardly know how far.

All this has no concern with the prevision of sin and
the fall of man. Indeed it would be equally consistent
with the assumption of an angelic nature by the Person
assuming. For we have spoken hitherto of the assumption
of a created nature by one of the Three Divine Persons in con-
nection with the mystery of creation generally. The created
nature, which He chose, remains for future consideration.
But if, for the moment, we take for granted His choice of

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 25

a human nature, and add to it the further consideration of
the fall, we come in sight of a fresh congmity in the
assumption of the created nature by the Second Person
rather than the First or Third. Adam fell in the lawless
search after science. His sin was a traitorous attempt to
force the divine wisdom to give up the secrets which it
chose to conceal. He endeavoured to force his way through
the beautiful marvels of God's own creation into the counsels
of God. He made a disloyal use of his science to increase
that science in spite of God. He leagued with the mighty
fallen intelligence of God's enemy, in order to learn what
God had forbidden him to know. Now the Word is the
substantial wisdom of the Father. It is by the Father's
knowledge of Himself that the Word is produced. So,
when in the prevision of sin the Incarnation took its
remedial form, it was most suitable that He, who is the
substantial wisdom of the Father, should be the Person to
assume that nature, which now needed redeeming because
it had fallen, and fallen in the unlawful and disobedient
pursuit of divine knowledge.

But, although it was the Person of the Son, and not the
Person of the Father or the Holy Spirit, which assumed a
created nature, we must bear in mind that that assumption
was the work of the whole Trinity. It was not more the
work of the Person assuming, than it was of the Two
Persons not assuming. Every work, which God does out-
side Himself, is the work of all the Three Persons equally,
even when there is something special in the mission and
operation of the different Persons. This is hard to under-
stand, but to believe it is an undoubted necessity of the
Catholic faith. It is equally of faith with the doctrine
that it was the Son, and not the Father or the Holy Ghost,
who assumed a created nature. It seems hard to say that
the Incarnation is not more the work of the Second Person

26 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

than it is of the First or the Third; yet we must cling
most jealously to this faith, or we shall throw all divine
truth into hopeless confusion. The Holy Trinity acts as
One God, even when creatures may come into special rela-
tions with One of the Divine Persons. The doctrine of
mission is not at variance with the unity and coequality
in the Godhead. Neither must we listen to some of the
older theologians, who held that the Father and the Holy
Ghost are in the Sacred Humanity of the Word merely by
essence, presence, and power, as They are in all creatures.
On the contrary, the Other Divine Persons are very specially
in the Sacred Humanity, by a most intimate connection
and concomitance though not by the intrinsic force of the
Incarnation, just as the Soul and Divinity of our Lord are
in the Blessed Sacrament by concomitacce, and not by the
force of the words of consecration. The very fact that the
Divine Essence dwells in a peculiar way in the Sacred
Humanity involves a peculiar indwelling of the Father and
the Holy Ghost, because the Divine Essence is one. Never-
theless we may have special feelings, not feelings of com-
parison or of preference or of distinction, yet special feelings
towards the One Person who was actually incarnate ; and we
may base our devotions on such feelings, without any fear of
deflecting from the analogy of the faith. Piety must of
necessity have its special feelings towards Each of the Three
Divine Persons, which feelings flow from Their personal dis-
tinctions ; and in the same way their missions to creatures,
and the absence of all mission in the Father, are the ground
for similar and still more special feelings. Still more shall
we feel this, when we remember what has been already said,
that the Second Person was incarnate precisely because He
was the Second Person. This is difficult doctrine. It would
even be dry, if doctrine could be dry. But we must bear
with a few difficulties at first. They will make what follows

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 27

easier, and they will illuminate many beauties, which except
by their light we should either never see, or see only as a
confused and dazzling indistinctness.

Thus the predestined created nature of the Word lay ever-
lastingly in the vast Bosom of the Father. It was a human
nature eternally chosen with a distinct and significant pre-
dilection. It was the first creature. It is He who in His
assumed nature we call Jesus. All angels, men, animals,
and matter, were made because of Him and for Him simply.
He is the sole reason of the existence of every created thing,
the sole interpretation of them all, the sole rule and measure
of every external work of God. It is in the light of this
predestination of Jesus that we must regard all life, all
science, all history, all the grandeurs of angels, all the
destinies of men, all the beautiful geography of this varie-
gated planet-garden, all the problematical possibilities of
world-crowded spaca Our own little tiny life, our own
petty orbit, like the walk of an insect on a leaf, lies in the
soft radiance of the predestination of Jesus, as in a beautify-
ing sunset, and has a sweet meaning there, and is wellnigh
infinitely dear to God, who clothes it with an importance to
Himself which it is the hardest of all mysteries to under-
stand, because it is the most incredible of loves.

Last of all, there was a time at which this eternal counsel
of God was to take efi'ect, and to become actual, as we
creatures speak, actual outside His own divine mind. Why
the Babe of Bethlehem was to come, and came, when He
did, and not before, why so early, and why so late, it is
beyond our power to say. Many reverent and lawful guesses
have been made ; but we pass them all over as plainly below
the majesty of the occasion, and the sublimity of the decree
which they profess to explain. But God's love of His crea-
tures so often condescends to wear the look of impatience,
that we are not surprised when theologians tell us, after oui

28 THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

own human way of speaking, that the Word impatiently
anticipated His time through the attraction of the purity of
Mary. Oh how like God always, patient for so long, and
then seemingly so impatient and sudden at the last ! But
is it not always so with grace ? There is a kind of sudden-
ness in its most deliberate operations, which recommends
itself only to a spiritual discernment. It is thus conversions
come. It is thus vocations ripen. God is always taking us
unawares when He means love, while justice on the other
hand gives long notice and makes noisy preparations, as if
it magnified itself by its inseparable accompaniments of
mercy.

The occupation of God has been from all eternity what it
is now, and will ever be. His own blessed Self. He is
bounded as it were by that blissful infinity. His life turns
upon it. His magnificence consists in it. His necessary
actions rise within it, and perpetuate themselves there for
evermore. He dwells in Himself, and is His own eternity.
But when we think of Him as from all eternity our Creator,
in design even when not yet in fact, it comes to us. almost
unconsciously to picture Him to ourselves, as greatly occu-
pied in choosing. From this point of view, choice seems
almost \ His principal occupation. He is electing, distin-
guishing, preferring.* Even when in our own thoughts we
give the amplest room to His foresight, we cannot obliterate
the view of His choosing, electing, and preferring. We
cannot even bring ourselves to think that He was bound to
create the best kind of world, or to do the best with it when
created. We cannot bring the shadow of necessity near
God, when we look at Him at work outside Himself. His

* Mary of Agreda says our Lord revealed to her that He never exer*
cised the act of choice but once, and that was when He chose suffering.
Perhaps He refrained His Human Nature from it, as from something be-
longing peculiarly to God. What a grand spiritual life might be based
en this one thought 1

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER, 29

blissful necessities lie within the Most Holy Trinity. Out-
side of Himself all is uncontrollable freedom, the freedom of
a boundless wisdom which is also boundless power, of an
infinite justice which is indistinguishable from infinite love.
In like manner, when we meditate on the life of the Word
who was to assume a created nature, we conceive of Him as
making choice of many things, as He lay in the Bosom of
the Father. He lived a life of elections ; and every one of
His elections most nearly and affectionately concerns our-
selves, while it is also based on nothing less than His own
infinite perfections ; and all these elections are eternal.

His first choice was of His nature. Countless possible
rational natures lay before Him in the clear landscape of His
wisdom. They must all have had attractions and congrui-
ties, inasmuch as they were the ideas of His own divine
mind. He had to choose amongst them, and to found His
choice on reasons of infinite beauty and unerring wisdom.
We dare not attribute a causeless predilection to God,
though His predilections may be unaccountable to us.
Especially He had to compare, only that comparison implies
too much of a process for infinite wisdom, the natures of
angels and of men, and perhaps other existing rational
natures also. How much depended upon this choice ! The
whole history of creation will simply flow out of it. The
reasons seem on the side of His assuming an angelic nature.
It is higher, and therefore nearer to Him. It is much more
magnificent, and therefore more suitable to Him. It is
purely spiritual, and we may conceive a Divine Person to
abhor the contact of matter. The Church expressly thanks
Him for not abhorring the virginal Bosom of His sinless
Mother. If we look at His compassion, we shall remember
that the angels had fallen no less than man, and that the
human race could be stopped with Adam and Eve, whereas
one third of the multitudinous angels had already fallen, or

30 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

were actually falling, into the abyss, in the sure prevision of
the Most High. The angels also love Him better than men.
They seem to love Him more in fact, as well as to have
greater powers of loving Him. Yet it is He, who in the
flesh seemed to love John more than Peter, though Peter
loved Him more than John. He chose human nature for
His assumption, rather than angelical, and He chose it with
the unerring choice of Grod. A thousand sciences lay deep
within that choice; and it is only the knowledge of the
character of God, which that choice has given us, that
enables us to conjecture any ground for the choice, while in
our estimation all the reasons would else have seemed against
it. There was an extremity of condescension in His choice
of a human nature, which better satisfies the divine perfec-
tions.* By the lowness of His descent He gained more of
what He could not have as God ; and it appears as if no
additional degree of humiliation was of little consequence in
His sight. He got deeper down into His own creation by
this choice, and came nearer to the edge of that nothingness
which is as it were the antipodes of God. If we could con-
ceive of a moment in which that choice was not yet made,
but in which it was at the very point of being made, how
should we not feel our own destinies trembling in the
balance ! All that makes this life endurable to us, all that
mellows the past or gilds the future, the whole vista of the
endless life before us, — all this, and much more about us that
we know not of, was involved in that eternal choice of the
nature to be assumed by the Person of the Eternal Word.
That choice is the rudder which is still at this moment
steering both our time and our eternity. Happy are we, be-
yond all angels, to be of the family whose nature was chosen
for Himself by the Eternal Word ! This is one of those
happinesses which make real unhappiness so impossible.
* See B. Sacr»ment. Book L »«ct. x.

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 31

When we enumerate all these choices of the Word in the
Father's Bosom, we do not forget that, as they were eternal,
they were also unsuccessive. But as we must name them
in some order, we arrange them as they would come accord-
ing to our notions of things. His nature chosen, and that
nature human. His next choice would be of His blessed SouL
Perhaps no two souls of men are alike. The products of
grace in each soul are as various as the productions of the
different soils of earth. The variety of the saints is one of
the most glorious varieties on earth. Thus countless beauti-
ful souls radiant in their vast capabilities of supernatural
holiness, exulting in the range and completeness of their
natural powers, arrayed in spiritual beauty of the most
enticing purity, hung before His eye, like shining orbs, in
the dark abyss of nothingness. Of all possible souls He had
His choice ; and He had to choose one which could bear to
dwell in the furnace of the Hypostatic Union, could light
up all heaven, in lieu of sun and moon, by its created
sanctity, and could hold an ocean of grace which was
only not absolutely illimitable. With what joy must not
such a choice have been accompanied ! With what unspeak-
able complacency must He not have rested not only in the
wisdom of His choice, but also in the precious object of it !

He chose likewise the Body in which He was to be incar-
nate. The pure Flesh and the precious Blood, which were to be
assumed by a Divine Person, and then remain for ever in
worshipful union with Him, were worthy objects of His
eternal choice. He chose such a temperament of Body as
should be able to endure the floods of glory He would pour
into it. He chose one whose extreme sensitiveness might
almost aid, rather than impede, the delicate operations of
His magnificent SouL He chose one whose beautiful texture
caused it to be hereafter such an instrument of suffering as
has never existed elsewhere amid all the immense capabi-

32 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

lities of created life. His future human lineaments were ol
His own designing. It was a joy to Him from all eternity
to read the loveliness of their varying expression. His
bright eye was a new eloquence which spoke to Him even
in that profound divine life of eternity. The accents of His
voice were even then a perpetual soundless music in His ear.
His likeness to His Mother was one of His eternal joys.
Thus did the heavenly Artist pourtray from all eternity,
upon the darkness of the uncreated waste, that beauty of
form and feature, which was to ravish angels and men with
an exceeding and unchanging love. Was He not Himself
delighted with His work 1

He chose His Mother also. When we reflect upon the
joy which it is to ourselves to think of Mary, to brood upon
her supernatural loveliness, and to study the greatness of her
gifts and the surpassing purity of her virtues, we shall get
such faint idea, as lies within our compass, of the unspeak-
able gladness which it must have been to the Word to have
chosen Mary, and to have created her through that very
choice. He must choose a Mother who shall be worthy of
being the Mother of God, a Mother suitable to that tremend-
ous mystery of the Hypostatic Union, a Mother fitted to
minister that marvellous Body out of her own heart's blood,
and to be herself for months the tabernacle of that most
heavenly SouL All God's works are in proportion. When
He appoints to an office, His appointment is marked by
extreme fitness. He elevates nature to the level of His own
purposes. He enables it to compass the most supernatural
destinies by fulfilling it with the most incredible graces.
There was no accident about His choice of Mary. She was
not merely the holiest of living women on earth at the time
when He resolved to come. She was not a mere tool, an
instrument for the passing necessity of the hour, to be used,
and flung aside, and lie indistinguishable in the crowd when

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 33

her use was gone. This is not God's way. He does not
deal thus with the least of His elect. His whole revelation
of Himself renders such a supposition as impossible as it
would be profane. There is nothing accidental or of mere
ornament in the works of the Most High. His operations
have no excrescences, no extrinsic appendages. God does
not use His creatures. They enter into His purposes, and
are an integral part of them; and every part of a divine
work is one of that work's perfections. This is a character-
istic of divine working, that everything about it is a special
perfection. Mary thus lies high up in the very fountain-
head of creation. She was the choice of God Himself, and
He chose her to be His Mother. She was the gate by which
the Creator entered into His own creation. She ministered
to Him in a way and for an end unlike those of any other
creature whatsoever. What then must have been her beauty,
what her holiness, what her privileges, what her exaltation !
To depreciate them is to depreciate the wisdom and the
goodness of God. When we have said that Mary was the
Word's eternal choice, we have said that which already
involves all the doctrine of the Church about her, and all
the homage of Christians to her. When we consider the
Word's desire to assume a created nature, when we ponder
His choice of a human nature, when we reflect on His
further choice of His Soul and Body, and add to all these
considerations the remembrance of His immense love, we
can see how His goodness would exult in the choice of His
Mother, whom to love exceedingly was to become one of
His chiefest graces, one of the greatest of all His human
perfections. All possible creatures were before Him, out of
which to choose the creature that was to come nearest Him,
the creature that was to love Him, and to have a natural
right to love Him, best of all, and the creature whom duty
as well as preference was to bind Him to love with the

c

34 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER,

intensest love. Then, out of all, He chose Mary. Wliat
more can be said ? She fulfilled His idea, or rather she did
not so much suit His idea, but she was herself His idea, and
His idea of her was the cause of her creation. The whole
theology of Mary lies in this eternal and efficacious choice of
her in the Bosom of the Father.

The Word's next choice was of the place where He and
His Mother were to dwell, that part of the material creation
which was to be the scene of His assumption of a created
nature, and of a nature itself partially material It does not
seem as if our ignorance could obtain so much as a glimpse
of any of the reasons which lay imbedded in His choice of
earth. The advancement of science only dishonours old
guesses, without apparently leading the way to new ones.
The more unimportant and uncentral we learn ourselves to
be physically in the huge creation round us, and the more
lost we are in the fabulous probabilities of sidereal space, the
less can we discern what it was which guided the Creator's
predilection this way. We know not why He chose for
man's abode our solar system rather than any other solar
system, or why He chose a satellite instead of a central
body, a planet rather than a sun, or why of the planets of
this system He chose the third one, which is neither eminent
in size or in position. There seems no physical propriety,
no material symmetry in His choice. The reasons therefore
must be of a sublimer kind, and lie deep in the wisdom of
the Word unfathomable to us. God deals with His crea-
tures in a very individual way. He tells us what concerns
ourselves, as far as it concerns us, and when it becomes
practical to us. He is at no pains to explain Himself, or to
reveal systems. He speaks to us according to our real wants.
He is a teacher of law rather than of science. He is a
Father whom we must trust rather than a potentate with
whom we must keep up a diplomatic understanding. Hii

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 35

reasons for choosing earth as the theatre of the Incarnation
lie at one side of our road to heaven, and off the road, and
therefore are not told us. There was doubtless deep and
blissful wisdom in the choice. We may lawfully love the
particular world which is our home, seeing that He loved it
so Himself, and crowned it with this eternal choice. Material
proprieties are not the measures of divine decisions; and
that is a thought which holds many thoughts in these days
of ours.

But there was another choice of His which leads our
ignorance into still more hopeless depths 'of helplessness.
In the Bosom of the Father the Word chose His eternal
companions, the elect among angels and men. We know
that all angels and all men were created for Him, and to
be His companions. We know that He desires the eternal
companionship of them all. We shrink with righteous
horror from supposing that the permission of evil was
granted simply that He might take occasion by it to ruin
everlastingly multitudes of creatures, whom it is of faith that
He loved intensely. We cannot tell why the two creations
of angels and of men should have been created in a sinless
liberty which needed not this permission to its freedom.
We are absolutely certain from what He has revealed of
Himself that there were reasons in infinite goodness that it
should be so, and that the freedom, by which angels and
men merit and sin, was suitable to His eternal designs of
creative love. We know also that the permission of evil
was not necessary to the exhibition of His justice, because
His justice is more wonderfully illustrated in the exaltation
of Mary than in the condemnation of sinners. We know
furthermore, that His choice of His elect in no wise inter-
fered with the liberty of any one of them, and yet, incom-
prehensible mystery ! that it was truly an efficacious choice.
"Whom He foreknew, He also predestinated." This is the

36 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

nearest approach which He Himself allows us to the solution
of this mystery. It was not a choice only, it was a fore-
knowledge also ; and it was not a foreknowledge only, it was
a choice also. He Himself will not allow us to contemplate
this mystery otherwise than in the sweet confidence which
the theological virtue of hope imparts to us, that we our-
selves were among the number of those- elect whose corre-
spondence to His grace and participation in His glory
gladdened His eye from all eternity. Meanwhile this is one
of the darkest parts of that marvellous life of elections which
He led before the beginnings of actual creation. We can
trust Him for it. Ko one can be astonished at getting out
of his depth in God. We shall not have a just idea of the
life of the Word in the Bosom of the Father if we keep out
of sight His wonderful jubilee in the choice of His elect, and
we fearlessly adore a joy which we know must have rested
on an absolutely boundless love ; for the justice of an all-
holy love is a justice which even those who suffer from it
cannot reasonably gainsay.

He chose also the glory which His Sacred Humanity was
to enjoy. He chose that dignity and splendour of His Body
which He should merit for it Himself in His Three-and-
Thirty Years, from the first instant of His Conception to
the moment of His Death ; and He looked with complacency
on the glory and blessedness which was thus to be enjoyed
by that Flesh which He should take from Mary, and with
which He should feed the generations of men in the realities
of the Blessed Sacrament. We may conceive, that, when
He foresaw His Passion, He felt an increased tenderness, to
speak thus foolishly of eternal things, for that Body which
was to be the instrument of those terrific sufferings whereby
He should redeem the world. He chose also that exaltation
of His Holy name, which He also merited Himself, and
which represents the whole history of His Church, and the

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 37

wonders of His Saints, and the supernatural chronicles of
religious orders. He chose too, among the things which He
Himself should merit, the magnificence of His judicial power
by which He should judge the world in His Human Nature
rather than His Divine, and by which He began from the
first moment of His Conception to judge every soul of man
that passed from this life to another. He exulted in the
immensity of glory which His Sacred Humanity should give
to the adorable justice of God by the exercise of this judicial
power alone. He foresaw His judgment of His sinless
Mother, and rejoiced unspeakably in the wise righteousness
with which He apportioned to her merits their wonderful
rewards. He foresaw His judgment of St. Joseph, whom
but a moment before He had assisted to die with filial solici-
tude, and the thought was dear to him of the words which
should confirm to His glorious foster-father the intensity of
his peace in limbus for a while, and the admirable splendour
of that throne in heaven, which he should enjoy. He looked
over the gigantic ocean of human actions and merits, and
His justice exulted royally in beholding not one trivial
kindness, not one single cup of cold water forgotten, or
unrewarded, or rewarded otherwise than with a divine muni-
ficence, in all that astonishing multitude of things which He
should have to judge. It was the Sacred Humanity scatter-
ing the largesse of the divine justice profusely over all
creation. His spotless holiness, too, found matter for true
and solemn jubilation in those other awards of severity,
awards slowly made yet without reluctance when the measure
of slighted mercy is filled up, whereby the majesty of an
offended God is vindicated with a rigour which only the
unrequited love of a Creator can display.

He chose also to be indebted to His own merits for the
mysterious reunion of His Body, Blood, and Soul in the
glorious mystery of the Resurrection, the nearest approach

3o THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

which merit could make towards the Hypostatic Union,
unless perchance He merited the extension of that Union to
those fresh additions to His Body which age and growth and
food added to it. He chose also the countless graces which
He should merit for the children of men, and what He
should merit also for the world of angels. How many
sciences were opened to His view, how many abysses of
rapturous contemplation outstretched before Him, in this
one matter of His merits, His election of them, their kind,
their number, their value, their beauty, their operation, both
for Himself and others ! One little section of this fair world
of choices were enough to fill a created spirit with bliss for
all eternity.

Yet all these glories, which His Sacred Humanity merited
for itself, were as nothing to those which belonged to it in
right of the Hypostatic Union, the unmerited fountain of all
its surpassing splendours. The glories which His divine
Filiation conferred upon His Humanity were the objects of
an eternal choice, in which we may reverently conceive the
"Word to have exulted with a still more marvellous delight.
The glory of His Soul lay beyond the reach even of His far-
stretching merits. Yasquez went so far as to teach that,
even by the absolute power of God, He could not have
merited the glory of His Soul, in which opinion we might
venture to differ from him. Nevertheless most true it is
that in the Bosom of the Father the Word chose the beatific
glory of His Soul, the immensity of its infused science, the
magnificence of its habitual grace, the grace of headship, His
royalty. His priesthood, and the boundless supremacy of His
spiritual power, as seven wide and deep and resplendent
creations lying within the compass of His Human Soul, and
lying outside the influence of His own amazing merits. All
these glories He chose with ineffable exultation, and He
exulted the more in choosing that they should flow from His

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 39

Divine Sonship, and not from 11 is merits. It was His
choice that the Hypostatic Union should endow His Sacred
Humanity, not merely with the capahilities of meriting
immense glories, but directly and of itself with those splen-
dours which should be its greatest and most wonderful
magnificences. We have but got to think for a moment of
the glory of His Soul, of its science, and its grace, in order to
Bee what almost illimitable fields of jubilant contemplation
lay before the Word in the Bosom of His Father, merely
respecting the created nature which it was decreed He should
assume. There was a heaven of divine joys in the multitude
of manifold choices which lay before Him, and to which His
own decrees with beautiful compulsion drew Him.

It is twice said of heaven, first by a prophet and then by
an apostle, that its joys are absolutely inconceivable by the
mind of man, and that these joys have been prepared by
God for those who love Him, " prepared," as if God had
taken pains about them and spent time over them, in order
to make them a gift worthy of His magnificence. Yet, from
what theology teaches us, how marvellous is the picture
which we can make to ourselves of the joys of heaven, to
what sublime heights faith elevates our imaginations, how
grand are the conceptions which we can form of that glorious
home even now in the darkness of our exile ! Nevertheless,
as Scripture tells us, the reality of its grandeur it has never
entered into our minds to conceive ! The joys of men on
earth are almost as countless as their souls. The joys of the
angels are above our comprehension, but they far outstrip
those of men both in multitude and in magnificence. We
can imagine hosts of delights arising from intellectual enjoy-
ment, or again from our affections, or again from the super-
natural tastes which our souls acquire through grace. We
can multiply these into fabulous sums. We can magnify
them into gigantic forms by the thought of God, His power,

40 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

His wisdom, and His love. We can conceive of them all as
blessedly fixed in a secure eternity, and our own natures un-
speakably widened and deepened for new capacities of joy.
But beyond all this there lies a world of heavenly joys which
we do not suspect, because it is not in our power to conceive
theiT kinds or their methods of operation. Who can dream
what will come of seeing God as He is ? Now all this
multitude of joys rose up at the choice of the Word in the
Bosom of the Father. There was not one which He did not
devise, and create, and stamp with the deepest impress of
His love. He set them aside for each spirit of angel and
soul of man, which should enter into His joy. He propor-
tioned them with an exuberant liberality, which was also at
the same time an unerring justice. He made them special
to each spirit and soul that should enjoy them. He counted
their infinity, weighed their ecstatic thrills, and measured to
each spirit the measure of the light of glory which should
strengthen him to bear such impetuous excess of joy ; and
the whole was to Him a work of the most unutterable glad-
ness and divine complacency. He chose too that fresh
outpoured sunshine over immortal souls in heaven, which
should be cast by His Sacred Humanity in the pleasures of
the glorified senses after the resurrection of the body. He
saw heaven suddenly flushed with a new verdure, and its
gardens blossoming with the translucent bodies of His elect,
as if they were multiplied images of Himself, voiceless
echoes of light to the light that streams from the Lamb
Himself.

One choice more, and we will close our list of the thrice
three choices of the Word. The vision of sin lay before
Him. He saw it all, as we can never see it, in its intensely
horrible nature, in the breadth of its empire, in its radical
opposition to God, in the tremendously fearful doom where-
with the divine justice would ultimately suffocate it. It lay

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 41

before Him, but His tranquillity was unmoved. Not a
breatb of disturbance passed even over tbe surface of His
blessedness. Not one of His decrees was turned aside. They
all flowed on in their immutable channels of eternal love.
But a new choice arose before Him. The sphere of His
justice was widened, while the objects of His love were
multiplied. He added to the choices He had already made
of His Soul and Body. He cnose now the power of suffering,
the capability of feeling sorrow, the vibrations of sensible
fear, the infirmity of wonder, the emotions of human anger.
He chose poverty, and shame, and death, and the Cross.
Over the bright and glorious destiny of the Mother of the
impossible Humanity, in which He would have come. He
drew a mysterious cloud of impenetrable dolours, and the
great queen of heaven was magnified beneath its shadows.
He marked out for Himself a pathway of Blood to the hearts
of His sinful creatures, those at least who bore the same
nature which He Himself had elected to assume. The elder
family of angels He passed over in their fall, but not in
disregard. They fell into the gulf of His justice, and were
drawn in and swallowed up for ever. Now Bethlehem and
Calvary lay before the Word as objects of intense desire, and
of what we have dared to call divine impatience. But there
was no stir in the Bosom of the Father. The pulses of the
Divine Life were not quickened for a moment. Nothing
was precipitated. The decrees went on with irresistible
slowness, like the huge glowing lava-streams down the flanks
of Etna, only that these were creative, prolific, fertilising,
streams of wisdom and of love. Still every moment was the
Son eternally generated of the Father. Still every moment
was the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father
and the Son. Not a sound was heard. Not a sight was
seen. There was no time to lapse by uncounted. There
was no vacancy, no void, no hollow, which might one day

41 TBB BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER,

be the room of spaca Thero was odIj the iiii£x; : v:;
imicovaVle life, to which neither past nor fature :;a:l..
Tr.er^ wi^ ::.e Blessed God.

Su:- w :; :: V occnpeticHis of the Woid in the Bosom of
the Tdiiiei, iii:J:i was the life of that Peiscai to whom oar
Mpcaal attuitioii is drawn, because He w..i :: e Person who
was t: ^?? vne a eraated nature. I: vs ,? ? : ,: a? that
ai^ :-;:::: was ooneemed, a life of ch.i.e?. .v::i e:*:.. choice
w.\i as ziach the choiee of the Father and the Holy Ghost,
a.5 '.: V. 15 of the Word Himsrif. Such was His everlasting
1 ::e u. '.he Boeom of the Father creatoiekssi and jet not
without ereatores^ only distingiushaUe to ns in its outermost
edges where the decrees of creation shine upon its waters
It was a creatnielesa hie, because creatures were not yet in
actual ezistuiee. It was a fife with creatoress because they
were in reality eternal in the Divine Mind. To ns it is as
ii we we:^ gifted with preternatural sight, and oonld look
u; in : : 55 visra, broad at its opening as the breadth of
tir ?.'^ ':::: : . . 'le^ creation, and rising np in flights of
:i .: f ■ :? _ J v: s.eps onward and npward, narrowing
&i: i.i:: " _: : . : ir,:. with the decrees of God like
n:\: .e f.o: les 5:1:':.: :. speechless rows on either hand,
ajii :i:e e:-?:: £ sy. :.;: ::5 shining white on their colossal
t_ 1:75 :::e v ,: . ei tv?^ into God, and the beaotifal

5 z:rL::::v of ini™ezse cr^o .: :: lies visibly in the predestina-
tion ci JesQs, and flows oat from the central fountain of the
Undivided Trinity, an emanation of the Divine life in in-
finite separation from it Then actual creation comes, and
stOl God lies in His rteamal Sabbath, even while He works.
Time and the world la^pse by, and fur off is the tranqniUi^
of God.

What can ever eqnal in magnificence the first ontward
bniBt of flie Omnipotent, when the angels broke forth out
ti Bofting in fn^rifltiT of lights mora niDDneroiis than the

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 43

Bands of the sea, each of them huge worlds of fire, with the
intellectual efifulgence of their majestic spirits beaming fax
and wide in transcending loveliness. We are blinded by
the very thought. The eyes of our mind ache, as with
lightning, while we picture to ourselves this first thunder-
storm, which broke forth at an instant from the feet of the
inaccessible throne of God. At the selfsame moment, out
of nothing rose the ponderous universe of matter, far out-
spread fields of the gauze-like breath of an immeasurable
heat, and the scarce-visible tissue of simplest elements, per-
haps of one element only, but of a myriad myriad forms,
wheeling off and condensing into numberless huge worlds,
all chained together by the filaments of an invisible attrac-
tion. There was a magnificence even in chaos which fed
the glory of the Creator.

Then perhaps came the vast geological epochs, revolving
cycles of ages unnumbered, because there was none but God
to number them. Marvellous floras covered our own earth
like a gorgeous tapestry. Wonderful faunas filled the seas
with life, and took possession of the continents. All the
while God was tranquil, and time and the world lapsed by.
The days of Adam came and went, and the strangeness of
antediluvian life. The flood came and did its stern work ;
and the pastoral plains of Mesopotamia were studded with
the tents of the patriarchs, until God's love lit upon the
hills and dells of Syria. The exodus of the chosen people
from the typical Egypt, the wilderness, the kingdom, the
captivity, the widespread heathendom, and the Immaculate
Conception, succeeded one another, as we speak, but in truth
lay all present at once to the eye of God, and His same
tranquil life went on. The Incarnation was realised in
Nazareth and made manifest in Bethlehem. The beautiful
ages of the catholic church began, and came to an end in
the Valley of Judgment. Each individual soul lay out

44 THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

before God clear and separate, in an orbit of its own, unti\
all met in conjunction in the same Valley of Judgment.
Then — we shall speak thus hereafter, when all is past, and
it is even now passing quietly — this family of creation was
gathered home into the Bosom of the Father, by the Word
who ever dwelt there, and by means of His Incarnation.

All this went by, and there was the same tranquil life of
God, unchanged, unchangeable. Yet God was not inactive.
Language cannot express to us in its reality the overfulness
of God's concurrence with everything, or the thrilling omni-
potence of His penetrative activity. The mystery is how
He can so concur, so interpenetrate and underlie all matter
and all spirit, and yet for ever be by Himself, in unutterable
and adorable unconfusion with created things. Thus all
this life in the Bosom of the Father, so far as it regarded
outward things, was from eternity steadily advancing to the
assumption of a created natare by an Uncreated Person.
All that is outside of God therefore bears exclusively on
this. There is no exception. Yet the tranquil eternal life
within that Bosom went on as ever. And now, — we speak
as we must one day speak, — the mighty populous heavens
lie with their worshipping crowds at the very feet of God.
The activity of heaven far transcends the feeble agitations of
earth. Its power, with Jesus and Mary and the angels and
the souls, is fearfully majestic to think upon. Its sciences
are like the sciences of God. Its loves are like the proces-
sion of the Holy Ghost. The realities of its doings, and its
energies, and its discoveries, and its contemplations, and
its beauties, are simply unimaginable by us who know only
the feverish intermittent indolence of mortal civilisation.
Its very created infirmities are hidden, almost healed, by the
near shadow of the Uncreated. Yet that tranquil life in
the Bosom of the Father is unchanged. As it was in the
creatureless eternity, so is it now. Every moment is the

THE BOSOM OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 45

Son eternally generated of the Father. Every moment is
the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son.
Everywhere there is the Blessed God, tranquil and self-
sufficing, unchanging and unchangeable : and we, it is the
only change, happy we, are lying in the lap of His eternity !
But between those two points, between the eternity before
creation and the eternity after the judgment shall have
fixed the endless lot of this family of the Incarnation, there
is the point to each of us which is our present, and in which
we are arduously working our way home to our Heavenly
Father. Our past and our future are both in our to-day.
How is our to-day by the side of the Bosom of the Eternal
Father, and of the Divine Life going on therein 1 Let us
revive our faith, and the world will at once drop down below
us, and the chains of a thousand petty interests, fall from us.
There is no liberty of spirit, except when we are breathing
the air of God. Let us mount up on high, and look at the
earth as it lies beneath us. There are creatures bom and
dying every moment, the one have to be started on their
destinies which are unending, the others to be seen through
that last conflict in which all the threads of life are to be
gathered up, and the doom to be, not merely according to
the past life, but according to the dispositions of that dread
To-day. There is all the turmoil of a resonant world
rising up towards the throne of God. The thunders of the
imprisoned fires of hell reach His ears. There are the high
winds and storms of the enormous atmosphere, and below it
the uneasiness of the throbbing feverish volcanoes, and the
perpetual, tremulous, elastic shiverings of the crust of the
earth. Above, there is the dazzling velocity of stupendous
revolving orbs in mute unechoing space, the wild rushing of
comets which law is spurring on at such headstrong speed,
and here and there among the countless worlds the crash of
some catastrophe, which is part of the uniformity of theii

46 THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

system. God has to be busy with all this. Then down in
the forests of seaweed on the pavement of the ocean, under
the bark and among the leaves of the forests of the land,
amid the thick, viewless insect-life of the populous air, He
is busy also, minutely occupied, incessantly occupied, per-
sonally occupied, with every individual form of life. Yet at
this moment there is no stir over the pellucid abysses of
His shoreless life. His Bosom is all tranquil as before.
The Father, calm and dread and beautiful, whose freshness
eternity cannot age, is in repose and majesty. The Son is
still issuing forth in His Bosom, noiselessly begotten in the
ravishing splendours of an eternal Generation. The Holy
Spirit is still the actually proceeding Jubilee of Both, out-
flowing, distinct, eternal, the same One Life.

But at this hour, somewhere in creation, that Bosom is
laid bare to spirits and to souls so that they can see It as It
is. This is a change from the old uncreatured life, but the
change is altogether outside the unchangeable. There is no
time, no lapse, no succession, there. There are no measur-
able epochs in that unadvancing, stationary, self sufficing,
indescribably blissful Life. Progress is the radical infirmity
of creatures. Yet the creature-time has surrounded the
Eternal and Uncreated with its sweet growths and secular
harvests in rings of created beauty and supernatural holiness.
He is showing them the Vision of Himself, localised some-
where. Eadiant fringes of saints and angels are stirring in
His light, as if they were the edges of His royal robes, and
prostrate multitudes lie like a golden pavement, thrilling
with light, around His throne. But are we sure the change
is all outside 1 The faith will not allow us to doubt of it.
Then is it most true that faith is more than sight. For it
looks as if there was a change inside. Far down, amid the
central lightnings of the Godhead, those lightnings which
feed instead of blighting the spirits and souls of creatures,

THE BOSOM OP THE ETERNAL FATHER. 47

it is as if there was a human Babe, not an adopted foundling
whom His mercy has taken up in its necessity, but His own
eternal idea, realised in time, the cause of all creation what-
soever, the cause of all that makes up our present life to-day,
except the evil which may hang about us like a clinging
mist. That Babe is the Causal-Idea of all things. The
spirits and the souls see Him there, and worship Him with
the thunders of ecstatic song. Yet still the Divine Life goes
on with its unsuccessive, endless, unbeginning pulsations.
Still is the Son being begotten, still is the Spirit proceeding,
still is the Father the Unbegotten Fountain of the Godhead,
Lonely, with leagues between, angels and souls far off, as
earth counts farness, nearest to the Throne sits a Virgin-
Mother, a creature who once was nothingness, and who would
fall back into nothingness this hour, if God did not fulfil,
sustain, uphold her with all His might and main, as it were,
by His essence, presence, power, grace, and glory. The Babe
in the Bosom of the Father is the likeness of that created
Mother, and is ever looking out at her, as if her Bosom
might tempt Him from that Bosom of the Father. She is
ever looking at Him, as she taught St. John to look at Him,
" in the Beginning," in the Bosom of the Father. This is
Mary's fixed view of her Child. This is John's fixed view
of his dear Master. He lay in that dread Bosom in idea
from all eternity. He lies there at this hour with His
Incarnation realised. It is the Babe of Bethlehem, Jesug
Christ, yesterday, and to-day, and tlie same for ever!

( 4« ;

CHAPTER II.

THE BOSOM OP MARY.

Thb Incaraation lies at the bottom of all sciences, and is
their ultimate explanation. It is the secret beauty in all
arts. It is the completeness of all true philosophies. It is
the point of arrival and departure to all history. The
destinies of nations, as well as of individuals, group them-
selves around it. It purifies all happiness, and glorifies all
sorrow. It is the cause of all we see, and the pledge
of all we hope for. It is the great central fact both of life
and immortality, out of sight of which man's intellect
wanders in the darkness, and the light of a divine life falls
not on his footsteps. Happy are those lands which are lying
still in the sunshine of the faith, whose wayside crosses,
and statues of the Virgin Mother, and triple angelus each
day, and the monuments of their cemeteries, are all so many
memorials to them that their true lives lie cloistered in the
single mystery of the Incarnation ! We too are happy,
happy in thinking that there are still such lands, few though
they be and yearly fewer, for the sake of Him whom we love,
and who reaps from them such ah abundant harvest of faith
and love. Yet who is there that does not love his own land
best of all ? To us it is sad to think of this western island,
with its world-wide empire, and its hearts empty of faith,
and the true light gone out within them. Multitudes of
saints sleep beneath its sod so famous for its greenness. No

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 49

land is so thickly studded with spire and tower as poor mute
England. In no other kingdom are noble churches strewn
with such a lavish hand up and down its hill and dale.
Dearest land I thou seemest worth a martyrdom for thine
exceeding beauty ! It must be the slow martyrdom of speak-
ing to the deaf, of explaining to the blind, and of pleading
with the hardened.

Time was, in ages of faith, when the land would not have
lain silent, as it lies now, on this eve of the twenty-fifth of
March. The sweet religious music of countless bells would
be ushering in the vespers of the glorious feast of the Incar-
nation. From the east, from central Rome, as the day
declined, the news of the great feast would come, from cities
and from villages, from alpine slope, and blue sea-bay, over
the leafless forests, and the unthawed snow-drifts on the
fallow uplands of France. The cold waves would crest them-
Belves with bright foam as the peal rang out over the narrow
channel : and, if it were in Paschal-time, it would double
men's Easter joys, and if it were in Lent, it would be a very
foretaste of Easter. One moment, and the first English bell
would not yet have sounded ; and then Calais would have
told the news to Dover, and church and chantry would have
passed the note on quickly to the old Saxon mother-church
of Canterbury. Thence, like a storm of music, would the
news of that old eternal decree of God, out of which all
creation came, have passed over the Christian island. The
saints "in their beds" would rejoice to hear, Augustine,
Wilfrid, and Thomas where they lie at Canterbury, Edward
at "Westminster, our chivalrous protomartyr where he keeps
ward amidst his flowery meads in his grand long Abbey
at St. Albans, Osmund at Salisbury, Thomas at Hereford,
Richard the Wonderful at Chichester, John at Beverley,
a whole choir of saints with gentle St. William at York,
onward to the glorious Cuthbert, sleeping undisturbed in

so THE BOSOM OF MARY,

his pontifical pomp beneath his abbey fortress on the seven
hills of Durham. With the cold evening wind the vast
accord of jubilant towers would spread over the weald of
Kent, amid its moss-grown oaks and waving mistletoe. The
low humble churches of Sussex would pass it on, as day
declined, to Salisbury, and Exeter, and St. Michael's fief
of Cornwall It would run like lightning up the Thames,
until the many-steepled London with its dense groves of city
churches, whose spires stand thick as the shipmasts in the
docks, would be alive with the joyous clangour of its airy
peals, steadied as it were by the deep bass of the great
national bell in the tower of Old St. Paul's. Many a stately
shrine in Suffolk and Norfolk would prolong the strain, until
it broke from the sea-board into all the inland counties,
sprinkled with monasteries, and proud parish churches fit to
be the cathedrals of bishops elsewhere, while up the Thames
by Windsor, and Reading Abbey, and the grey spires of
Abingdon, Oxford with its hundred bells would send forth
its voice over wold and marsh to Gloucester, Worcester, and
even down to Warwick and to ^Shrewsbury, and its southern
sound would mingle with the strain that came across from
Canterbury, amid the Tudor Churches of the orchard-loving
Somerset, at the foot of Glastonbury's legendary fane, and
on the quays of Bristol, whose princely merchants abjured
the slave-trade at the preaching of St. Wulstan. In the
heart of the great fen, where the moon through the mist
makes a fairyland of the willows and the marsh-plants, of the
stagnant dikes and the peat embankments and the straight
white roads, the bells of the royal sanctuary of Ely would
ring out merrily, sounding far off or sounding near as the
volumes of the dense night-mist closed or parted, cheating
the traveller's ear. A hundred lichen-spotted abbeys in
those watery lowlands would take up the strain, while great
St. Mary's, like a precentor, would lead the silvery peals of

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 51

venerable Cambridge, lowlying among its beautiful gardens
by the waters of its meadow-stream. Lincoln from its steep
capitol would make many a mile of quaking moss and black-
watered fen thrill with the booming of its bells. Monastic
Yorkshire, that beautiful kingdom of the Cistercians, would
scatter its waves of melodious sound over the Tees into
Durham and Northumberland, northward along the con-
ventual shores of the grey North Sea, and westward over the
heath-covered fells and by the brown rivers into Lancashire,
and Westmoreland, and Cumberland, whose mountain-echoes
would answer from blue lakes, and sullen tarns, and the
crags where the raven dwells, and the ferny hollows where
the red-deer couches, to the bells of Carlisle, St. Bees, and
Furness. Before the cold white moon of March has got the
better of the lingering daylight, the island, which seemed
to rock on its granite anchors far down within the ocean,
as if it tingled with the pulses of deep sound, will have
heard the last responses dying muffled in the dusky Cheviots,
or in the recesses of gigantic Snowdon, and by the solitary
lakes of St. David's land, or trembling out to sea to cheer
the mariner as he draws nigh the shore of the Island of the
Saints. Everywhere are the pulses of the bells beating in
the hearts of men. Everywhere are their hearths happier.
Everywhere, over hill and dale, in the street of the town,
and by the edge of the fen, and in the rural chapels on the
skirts of the hunting-chase, the Precious Blood is being out-
poured on penitent souls, and the fires of faith burn brightly,
and holiest prayers arise ; while the angels, from the southern
mouths of the Aran and the Adur to the banks of the brawl-
ing Tweed and the sands of the foaming Solway, hear only,
from the heart of a whole nation, and from the choirs of
countless churches, and from thousands of reeling belfries,
one prolonged Magnificat.

These things are changed now. Let them pass. Yet not

52 THE BOSOM OF MARY

without regret. It is the Feast of the Incarnation. God ii
immutable. Our jubilee must be in Him. "We must nestle
deeper down in His Bosom, while science, and material
prosperity, and a literature, which has lost all echoes of
heaven, are thrusting men to the edge of external things,
and forcing them down the precipice. It may be a better
glory for us, if our weakness fail not in the wilderness, that
our faith should have to be untied from aU helps of sight
and sound, and left alone in the unworldly barrenness
where God and his eagles are. Poor England ! Poor English
souls ! But it is the Feast of the Incarnation. God is
immutable. Our jubilee must be in Him.

God is incomprehensible. When we speak of Him, we
hardly know what to say. Faith is to us instead both of
thought and tongue. In like manner those created things,
which lie on the edges of His intolerable light, become
indistinct through excess of brightness, and are seen con-
fusedly as He is Himself. Thus He has drawn Mary so
far into His light, that, although she is our fellow-creature,
there is something inaccessible about her. She participates
in a measure in His incomprehensibility. "We cannot look
for a moment at the noonday sun. Its shivering flames of
black and silver drive us backward in blindness and in pain.
"Who then could hope to see plainly a little blossom, floating
like a lily, on the surface of that gleaming fountain, and
topped everywhere by its waves of fire 1 So is it with
Mary. She lies up in the fountainhead of creation, almost
at the very point where it issues from God ; and amid the
unbearable coruscations of the primal decrees of God she
rests, almost without colour or form to our dazzled eyes ;
only we know that she is there, and that the divine light is
her beautiful clothing. The longer we gaze upon her the
more invisible does she become, and yet at the same time
the more irresistible is the attraction by which she drawa

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 53

us towards herself. While her personality seems to be
almost merged in the grandeur of her relationship to God,
our love of her own self becomes more distinct, and our own
relationship to her more sweetly sensible.

It was a wonderful life which the Eternal Word led in
the Bosom of the Father. It fascinates us. We can
hardly leave off speaking of it. Yet behold ! He seeks also
a created home. Was His eternal home wanting in aught
of beauty or of joyi Let the raptured seraphs speak, who
have lain for ages on the outer edge of that Uncreated
Bosom, burning their immortal lives away in the fires of an
insatiable satiety, fed ever from the vision of that immutable
Beatitude. There could be nothing lacking in the Bosom
of the Father. God were not God, if He fell short of self-
sufficiency. Yet deep in His unfathomable wisdom there
was something, which looks to our eyes like a want. There
is an appearance of a desire on the part of Him to whom
there is nothing left to desire, because He is self-sufficient.
This apparent desire of the Holy Trinity becomes visible to
our faith in the Person of the Word. It is as if God could
not contain Himself, as if He were overcharged with the
fulness of His own essence and beauty, or rather as if He
were outgrowing the illimitable dimensions of Himself.
It seems as if He must go out of Himself, and summon
creatures up from nothing, and fall upon their neck, and
overwhelm them with His love, and so find rest. Alas !
how words tremble, and grow wild, and lose their meanings,
when they venture to touch the things of God ! God's
love must outflow. It seems like a necessity ; yet all the
while it is an eternally pondered, eternally present, freedom,
glorious and calm, as freedom is in Him who has infinite
room within Himself. What looks to us so like a necessity
is but the fulness of His freedom. He will go forth from
Himself, and dwell in another home, perhaps a series of

54 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

homes, and beatify wherever He goes, and multiply foi
Himself a changeful incidental glory, such as He never had
before, and scatter gladness outside Himself, and call up
world after world, and bathe it in His light, and communi-
cate His inexhaustible Self inexhaustibly, and yet remain
immutably the Same, awfully reposing on Himself, majesti-
cally satiating His adorable thirst for glory from the depths
of His own Self. Abysses of being are within Him, and
His very freedom with a look of imperiousness allures Him
into the possibilities of creation. Yet is this freedom to
create, together with the free decree of creation, as eternal
as that inward necessity by which the Son is ever being
begotten, and the Holy Spirit ever proceeding. All this
becomes visible to us in time, and visible in the Person of
the "Word, and only visible by supernatural revelation,
which reason may corroborate, but never could discover.

The Word in the Father's Bosom seeks another home, a
created home. He will seem to leave His uncreated home,
and yet He will not leave it. He will appear as though
He were allured from it, while in truth He will go on
filling it with His delights, as He has ever done. He will
go, yet He will stay even while He goes. Whither then
will He go ? What manner of home is fit for Him, whose
home is the Bosom of the Father, and who makes that
home the glad wonder that it is? All possible things day
before Him at a glance, as on a map. They lay before Him
also in the sort of perspective which time gives, and by
which it makes things new. His home shall be wonderful
enough ; for there is no limit to His wisdom. It shall be
glorious enough; for there is no boundary to His power.
It shall be dear to Him beyond word or thought ; for there
is no end to His love. Yet even so, nothing short of an
infinite condescension can find any fitness for Him in finite
things. Kevertheless such as a God's power and a God's

THE BOSOM OF MARY, 55

wisdom and a God's love can choose out of a God's possi-
bilities, His created home shall he. Who then shall dream,
until he has seen it, what that thrice infinite perfection of
the Holy Trinity shall choose out of His inexhaustible
possibilities 1 Who, when he has seen it shall describe it
as he ought? The glorious, adorable, and Eternal Word,
in the ample range of His unrestricted choice, predestinated
the Bosom of Mary to be His created home, and fashioned,
with well-pleased love, the Immaculate Heart which was to
tenant it with Himself. O Mary, 0 marvellous mystical
creature, 0 resplendent mote, lost almost to view in the
upper light of the supernal fountains ! who can suflBciently
abase himself before thee, and weep for the want of love to
love thee rightly, thee whom the Word so loved eternally ?

There were no creatures to sing anthems in heaven, when
that choice was made. No angelic thunders of song rolled
round the Throne in oceans of melodious sound, when the
Word decreed that primal object of His adorable predilection.
No creations of almost divine intelligence were there to
shroud their faces with their wings, and brood in self-abasing
silence on the beauty of that created Home of their Creator.
There was only the silent song of God's own awful life, and
the eternal voiceless thunder of His good pleasure. Forth-
with— we must speak in our own human way — the Holy
Trinity begins to adorn the Word's created home with a
marvellous effluence of creative skill and love. She was to
be the head of all mere creatures, having a created person
as well as a created nature, while her Son's created nature,
with the Uncreated Person, was to be the absolute Head of
all creation, the un confused and uncommingling junction of
God and of creation. She was to be a home for the Word,
as the Bosom of the Father had been a home for Him,
realised and completed in unity of nature. The materials,
which the Word was to take for His created nature, wer«

56 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

once to have been actually hers, so that the union between
the Word and herself should be more awful than words can
express. Each Person of the Holy Trinity claimed her for
His own by a special relationship. She was the eternally
elected daughter of the Father. There was no other relation-
ship in which she could stand to Him, and it was a reflection
of the eternal filiation of His uncreated Son. She was the
Mother of the Son ; for it was to the amazing realities of
that ofiice that He had summoned her out of nothing. She
was the Spouse of the Holy Ghost ; for He it was who was
wedded to her soul by the most transcendent unions which
the kingdom of grace can boast, and it was He who out of
her spotless Blood made that undefiled Flesh, which the
Word was to assume, and to animate with His Human Soul.
Thus she was marked with an indelible character by Each
of the Three Divine Persons. She was Their eternal idea,
nearest to that Idea which was the cause of all creation, the
Idea of Jesus ; she was necessary, as They had willed it, to
the realisation of that Idea; and she came before it in
priority of time and in seeming authority of office. Such
is the bare statement of the place which Mary occupies in
the decrees of God. All we could add would be weak com-
pared with this. "Words cannot magnify her whom thought
can hardly reach ; and panegyric is almost presumption, as
if what lies so close to God could be honoured by our
approval. Our praise of Mary, in this one respect like our
praise of God, of which it is in truth a part, is best embodied
in our wonder and our love.

"Was it as if God lost something, when He realised His
beautiful ideas, and so creatures came in some way to share
with Him in the enjoyment of their beauty 1 "Was it as if,
when His idea thus escaped Him in act. He was bereaved
of His treasures, and was less rich a God than He was
before ^ Surely not ; for what was all creation, but the

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 57

immensity of His communicative love finding undreamed-of
outlets into unnumbered worlds 1 Yet the Divine Persons
seem — again it is seeming of which we must speak, we whose
tenses and moods are always dishonouring the inexplicable
present of eternity — to brood, and wait, and ponder, and
feed upon the wisdom and loveliness which lay hid in Their
idea of the Word's created home. To create was to unveil
the sanctuary, and They appeared to pause. At length, after
an eternity which could have no Afterwards, actual creation
began. Angels, and matter, created together that spirit might
be humble in its precedence, and then man, were as three
enchanting preludes to Jesus and Mary, preludes of surpass-
ing sweetness, full of types and symbols and shadows cast
forward from what was yet to be in act, though it was prior
and supreme in the divine decrees. The Fall has come, and
still God waits. The sun has set on the now tenantless
Eden, but the decrees make no haste. They quicken not
their pace. Four thousand years are truly as nothing, even
in the age of the planet ; yet they are long when souls are
sinning, and hearts are pining, and the footsteps of genera-
tions fainting, because of the delay of the Messias. God
still lingers. His glory seems to stoop and feed on the
desires of the nations and the ages, while the shadows of
doubt and the sickness of deferred hope gather round them
so disconsolately.

As the Sacred Humanity is the head of creation and the
fountain of grace both to angels and to men, and perhaps to
other species of rational creations still unborn, so was it meet
in the divine dispensations, that the Precious Blood of Jesus
should merit all the graces necessary to ornament the Word's
created home. Now that the Incarnate Word was to come
as a Redeemer, His Mother must be redeemed by Him with
a singular and unshared redemption. Beautiful as she was
in herself, and incalculable as were her merits, her greatest

58 THB BOSOM OF MARY.

graces were not merited by herself, but by that Precious
Blood which was to be taken from her own. The first white
lily that ever grew on that ruddy stem was the Immaculate
Conception ; and when the time for Mary's advent came,
that was the first grace with which the Divine Persons
began Their magnificent work of adorning. It was a new
creation, though it was older in the mind of God, as men
would speak, than the first-bom angels, or the material
planet, which, if we are to credit the tales of science, so
many secular epochs and millenniums had at last matured
for the Incarnation.

It was on the eighth of December that those primeval
decrees of God first began to spring into actual fulfilment
upon earth. Like all God's purposes, they came among men
with veils upon their heads, and lived in unsuspected
obscurity. Yet the old cosmogony of the material world was
an event of less moment far than the Immaculate Conception.
When Mary's soul and body sprang from nothingness at the
word of God, the Divine Persons encompassed Their chosen
creature in that self-same instant, and the grace of the
Immaculate Conception was Their welcome and Their touch.
The Daughter, the Mother, the Spouse, received one and the
same pledge from All in that single grace, or wellhead of
graces, as was befitting the grandeur of her Predestination,
and her relationship to the Three Divine Persons, and the
dignity she was to uphold in the system of creation. In
what order her graces came, how they were enchained one
with another, how one was the cause of another, and how
others were merely out of the gratuitous abundance of God,
how they acted on her power of meriting, and how again her
merits reacted upon them, — all this it is beside our purpose
to speak of, even if we could do so fittingly. But the com-
monest grace of the lowest of us is a world of wonders itself,
and of supernatural wonders also.

THE BOSOM OF MARY, 59

How then shall we venture into the labyrinth of Mary's
graces, or hope to come forth from it with anything more
than a perplexed and breathless admiration 1 It was no less
than God who was adorning her, making her the living
image of the August Trinity. It was that she might be the
mother of the Word and His created home, that omnipotence
was thus adorning her. To the eye of God her beautiful
soul and fair body had glided like stars over the abyss of a
creatureless eternity, discernible amid the glowing lights and
countless scintillations of the angelic births, across the dark-
ness of chaos and the long epochs of the ripening world, and
through the night of four thousand years of wandering and
of fall. How must she have come into being, if she was to
come worthily of her royal predestination, and of the decrees
she was obediently to fulfil, and yet with free obedience !

Out of the abundance of the beautiful gifts with which
God endowed her, some colossal graces rose, like lofty moun-
tain tops, far above the level of the exquisite spiritual scenery
which surrounded them. The use of reason from the first
moment of her Immaculate Conception enabled her to advance
in grace and merits beyond all calculation. Her infused
science, which, from its being infused, was independent of
the use of the senses, enabled her reason to operate, and thus
her merits to accumulate, even during sleep. Her complete
exemption from the slightest shade of venial sin raised her
as nearly out of the imperfections of a creature as was con
sistent with finite and created holiness. Her confirmation
in grace made her a heavenly being while she was yet on
earth, and gave her liberty and merit a character so different
from ours, that in propositions regarding sin and grace we
are obliged to make her an exception, together with our
Blessed Lord. So gigantic were the graces of that super-
natural life, which God made contemporaneous with her
natural existence, that in her very first act of love her heroic

6o THE BOSOM OF MARY.

virtues began far beyond the point where those of the highest
saints have ended.

All this is but a dry theological description of the Word's
created home, as it was when the Divine Persons clothed
and adorned it as it rose from nothingness. Yet how sur-
passingly beautiful is the sanctity which it implies ! Fifteen
years went on, with those huge colossal graces full of vitality,
uninterruptedly generating new graces, and new correspond-
ences to grace evoking from the abyss of the Word new
graces still, and merits multiplying merits, so that if the
world were written over with cyphers it would not represent
the sum. It seems by this time as if her grace were as nearly
infinite as finite thing could be, and her sanctity and purity
have become so constrainingly beautiful, that their constraints
reach even to the Eternal Word Himself, and He yields to
the force of their attractions, and anticipates His time, and
hastens with inexplicable desire to take up His abode in His
created home. This is what theology means when it says,
that Mary merited the anticipation of the time of the
Incarnation.

But let us pause for a moment here. St. Denys, when he
saw the vision of Mary, said with wonder that he might
have mistaken her for God. We may say, in more modem
and less simple language, that Mary is like one of those great
scientific truths, whose full import we never master except
by long meditation, and by studying its bearings on a system,
and then at last the fertility and grandeur of the truth seem
endless. So is it with the Mother of God. She teaches us
God as we never could else have learned Him. She mirrors
more of Him in her single self, than all intelligent and
material creation beside. In her the prodigies of His love
towards ourselves became credible. She is the hill-top, from
which we gain distant views into His perfections, and see
fair regions in Him, of which we should not else have dreamed.

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 6i

Our thoughts of Him grow worthier, by means of her. The
full dignity of creation shines bright in her, and, standing
on her, the perfect mere creature, we look over into the
depths of the Hypostatic Union, which otherwise would have
been a gulf whose edges we never could have reached. The
amount of human knowledge in the present age is overwhelm-
ing ; yet the deepest thinkers deem science to be only in its
infancy. Many things indicate this truth. Just as each
science is yearly growing, yearly outgrowing the old systems
which held it within too narrow limits ; so is the science of
Mary growing in each loving and studious heart all through
life, within the spacious domains of vast theology ; and in
heaven it will forthwith outgrow all that earth's theologies
have laid down as limits, limits rather necessitated by the
narrowness of our own capacities, than drawn from the real
magnitude of her whom they define.

Yet we should ill use Mary's magnificence, or rather we
should show that we had altogether misapprehended it, if we
did not use it as a revelation of God, and an approach to
Him. What was it in her which so attracted God 1 What
drew the Word from the Bosom of the Father into her
Bosom with such mysterious allurement 1 It was as if He
were following the shadow of His own beauty. It was be-
cause the delights of the Holy Trinity were so faithfully
imaged there. All was His. It was to His own He went.
It was His own which drew Him. He was but falling in
love with His own wisdom, when He so loved her. Her
natural life was His own idea, her beauty a sparkle of His
science, her birth an effortless act of His own almighty will.
Her graces were all from Him. She had nothing which she
had not received.

Like the moon, her loveliness was all from borrowed light,
softening and glorifying even in her a thousand craters of
finite imperfection, which would have yawned black and

62 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

dismal, if the endless shining of the sun had not beaten full
upon her, making beautiful and almost luminous the very
shadows that are cast from her unevenness. Her grandest
realities are but pale reflections of Himself. Her immense
sanctity is less than a dew drop of His uncreated holiness,
which the beautiful white lily has caught in its cup, and
holds up trembling to the sunrise. Thus it is that God is
all in all. Thus it is, that the higher we rise in the scale of
creatures, the less we see that is their own, and the more we
see that all is His. The angels gleam indistinguishably
bright in their individual brightnesses, because they lie so
near to God. In Mary, character, personality, special virtues,
cognisable features, the creature's own separate, though not
independent, life, are to our eyes almost obliterated, because
the bloom of God flushes her all over with its radiance,
making herself and the lineaments of self as indistinguishable
as a broad landscape beneath the noonday sun. The orb
must have sloped far westward, before we can measure
distances, and discern the separate folds of wood, and the
various undulations of the champaign. With Mary, the Orb
will never slope westward. It will stand vertical for ever.
But we shall have a light of glory, like a new sense, fortifying
our souls, and we shall go into the blaze, and see her there
with magnificent distinctness lying deep in the glow of God.
She will be a million times more great and beautiful to us
then than she is now, and yet we shall see that less than a
mote is to the magnitude of the huge sun, so much less that
it is a littleness inexpressible, is Mary, the creature, to the
greatness, the holiness, the adorable incomprehensibility of
her Creator ! Yet in Him, not in her, will be our rest.
Even Him we shall see as He is ! Oh dizzy thought ! Most
overwhelming truth ! Yet nothing less than this Vision, to
the very least of us, was the almost incredible purpose of
our creation, the glorious consequence of our faint similiiude

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 63

to that Incarnate Word, of whom Mary was the elected
Mother !

The divine decrees came onward in their mysterious slow-
ness. They appeared on earth, and then paused, as it seemed,
for fifteen years, and then, as it were, leaped precipitately
and out of course to their fulfilment. There is almost always
this douhle appearance, first of slowness and then of precipita-
tion in all divine works. It is a characteristic of them, the
pondering of which will reward us, when we have leisure t«
do so. It is as if wisdom waited and was slow, till love
called in omnipotence to its aid, and forthwith gained its
end. Meanwhile we must wait on the grand decree, which
is trembling on the very verge of its accomplishment. The
Eternal Word is about to assume His created nature. AU
things are subordinate to this. The magnificence of Mary is
but His road, His instrument, His means. Her magnificence
is simply in her ministering.

The day, the hour, the place, the messenger, all come at
last; for His beautiful created Home is ready for Him,
shining with the greatness of its graces, fragrant with the
perfume of its holiness. The day has come. According to
our counting it is Friday the twenty-fifth of March. Why
has it been so long delayed ? This is a mystery which does
not concern us. Why is it that preparation always forms
so much greater a part of the Creator's works than it does of
the creature's ? Is it wholly for the creature's sake, or is it
indicative of some perfection in the Creator ? It is at least
a disclosure of His character, which fixes our attention, and
is not without its influence on our conduct. Why was He
so long in preparing the world for the habitation of man ?
What means the old age of the lifeless rocks ? Wherefore
were those vast epochs of gigantic foliage, as if it were not
beneath the minute consideratenesses of His love to be laying
in wealth and power for generations of unborn men 1 Why

64 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

were land and sea distributed and re-distributed again and
again, as if He were a fastidious artist who could not please
Himself, because He could not express His idea except
through repeated experiments 1 What end did those secular
periods of huge sea-monsters and terrific creeping things sub-
serve ? Why was man so late a birth in the epoch of those
perfect animals, which were either his predecessors or his
companions? Why should earth have to be the teeming
burial-ground of dynasties dethroned and tribes extinct, before
the true life for which it was meant came upon it ? Who
can tell 1 Perhaps it was not so. But, if it was so, it was
His will. The delay of the Incarnation is parallel to what
geology professes to reveal to us of the fitting and adorning
and re-touching of the planet, if that can be called re-touch-
ing which was doubtless the simple development of a vast
and tranquil uniformity. But the day came at last, the
twenty-fifth of March, ever memorable among men as the
date of the Incarnation. There was doubtless some deep
and beautiful reason why it was not on the twenty-fourth,
or on the twenty-sixth, and why it should be on the anniver-
sary of Adam's fall, and hereafter of the Crucifixion, — there
was doubtless some deep reason, because God has no surface ;
all things are deep which are in Him.

But of the chosen day the first moment was chosen also.
The stars had scarcely marked the midnight in the sky, when
the decree accomplished itself. Perhaps the greatest silence
of created things, the hush of the nocturnal earth, was most
suited to the Creator's coming, just as it was in the cool
sabbath-like evenings that He used to walk with Adam in
the old Asiatic paradise. Goodness, also, like evil, though
for opposite reasons, affects darkness and obscurity. God
seems marvellously to shun witnesses. The Resurrection
manifests this to us, that unwitnessed mystery, the witness-
ing of which was nevertheless to be a main function of the

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 65

college of apostles. Yet they even were only allowed to bear
witness, not to its taking place, but to its having undoubtedly
taken place. So it is in science, in all questions of life, in
the creation of species, in God's viewless omnipresence, in
the operation of His supernatural sacraments, in the actual
communications of grace, in all positive contacts with Him,
our research is baffled on the very threshold of discovery.
We just reach the point where we should see God the next
moment ; and without any visible obstacles, without walls
or rocks or any palpable fences, we are mysteriously stayed.
We can advance no further. We seem to hear the sound of
God working, almost to feel His breath ; but He will not be
witnessed. He remains invisible. As it is in His lesser
works, so was it in this His greatest. He came in the dark
night, when men were unsuspecting : yet He did not take
them by surprise ; for, when the morning broke. He did not
even tell them that He had come. Do we not know our-
selves, that, although we are God's creatures, and creation is
full to overflowing of Him, and is meant to raise us to Him,
we nevertheless feel we are most with God when least
occupied with His outward creation, and draw nearest to
Him in proportion as we draw back furthest from creatures ?
So, on His side. He seems to keep aloof, even when He is
coming in closest contact with us. He shrinks from view,
whose blaze we could not bear.

The place, where the Word's assumption of His created
nature was to be effected, was the inner room, or woman's
apartment, of the Holy House of Nazareth, where Mary and
Joseph dwelt. It was an obscure dwelling of humble
poverty in a rustic and sequestered village of a small land,
whose days of historic glory had passed away, and whose
destiny in the onward march of civilisation would seem, as
philosophical historians would speak, to be exhausted. The
national independence of the people had come to an end.

66 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

The questions, which divided their sects, were narrow and
trivial. Jerusalem, long since eclipsed by Athens and out-
grown by Alexandria, sat now, humbled and silent, beneath
the sombre shade of Kome. Even in this land Nazareth
was almost a byeword of contempt. Folds of pastoral green
hills shut it up within itself, and its men were known
beyond their own hills only for a coarse and fierce rusticity,
with perhaps a reputation for something worse. The Eternal
God was about to become a Nazarene. He, whose eye saw
down into every wooded hollow and penetrated every sylvan
glen upon the globe, who saw the white walls of fair cities
perched jealously on their hill- tops or basking in the sun-
shine by the blue sea, chose that ill -famed inglorious
Nazareth for the scene of His great mystery.

Who can deem that aught with God is accidental, or that
anything happened as it might chance to happen with the
central wonder of the Incarnation ? It was His choice ; and
to us Nazareth, and its Holy House, exiled, wandering, and
angel-borne, Syrian, Dalmatian, Italian, all by turns, are
consecrated places, doubly consecrated by their old memories,
and also by their strange continued life of local graces and
the efiicacious balm of a Divine Presence, awful and un-
decayed.

The occupations of that Holy House at Nazareth must not
pass unnoticed. The minutest feature in the most ordinary
circumstance of the Creator's assumption of a created nature
must be full of significance. From the Gospel narrative of
the Annunciation we should infer that Mary had received
no warning of what was about to happen, still less therefore
of the time when the mystery should be accomplished.
Great events commonly cast a peaceful trouble into great
souls before they come, as if there was deep down in heroic
natures something like a natural gift of prophecy. Such
vibrations, awakening yet indistinct, may have thrilled

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 67

through Mary's soul. Otherwise the mystery took her
unawares ; and, till the moment came, the greatness of her
science and the wonder of her conscious holiness had not
so much as excited a suspicion in her beautiful humility.

Her unpreparedness thus gives a greater significance to
her occupations at the time. The night was still and calm
around her. We know not whether Joseph was wakefully
pondering on the divine mercies, or whether that man of
heavenly dreams was resting from the toils of the artisan's
rude day in holy sleep. When the shadow of the everlasting
decree stole upon her, Mary, the wonderful and chosen
creature, was alone, and, according to the universal belief,
immersed in prayer. She was spending the hours of the
silent night in closest union with God. Her spirit then, as
always, was doubtless raised in ecstasy to heights of rapturous
contemplation. It was in the act of her prayer that the
Word took possession of His created home. It was perhaps
the immense increase of merit, and so the immense increase
of her interior beauty, in that very prayer, which ended the
delay, and precipitated the glorious mystery. It was per-
haps one of her intense aspirations, an aspiration into which
her whole soul and all the might of its purity were thrown,
that drew the everlasting Son so suddenly at last from the
Bosom of the Father. How often have the desires of the
saints been their own immediate fulfilment, because of their
intensity ! But what desire ever had such intensity, as
Mary's yearning for Messias, unless indeed it were His own
eternal longing for His created nature ? It was at least in
an hour of awe- stricken worship that God visited her. Her
created spirit was busied in adoration, when the Uncreated
came, and took His Flesh and Blood, and dwelt within her.
In all this too we see the fashion of God's ways.

Yet His coming was not abrupt. He sent His messenger
before He came Himself. We know nothing of the antece-

68 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

dents of the individual angels ; but Gabriel appears through-
out Scripture, in the days of Daniel as well as those of
Mary, to be the angel of the Incarnation.* There was
doubtless something in his own character, something in his
special graces, something in the part he had taken against
the rebellious angels, which peculiarly fitted him for this
office, to which also he had unquestionably been predestinated
from all eternity. It implies an extreme beauty of character,
and a special relationship to Each of the Three Divine Persons,
and also a peculiar angelical similitude to Mary. He had
been throughout the official herald of the decrees regarding
the Incarnation, and he appears at this time in the midnight
room at Nazareth, because the weeks of Daniel have run
out, and he is preceding now, hardly by a moment, the ever-
lasting decrees. But what is the especial purpose for which
he has come ? To ask in the name of God for Mary's consent
to the Incarnation. The Creator will not act in this great
mystery without His creature's free consent. Her freedom
shall be a glorious reflection of His own inefl'able freedom in
the act of creation.

The Omnipotent stands on ceremony with His feeble, finite
creature. He has already raised her too high to be but a
blind instrument. Moreover the honour of His own assump-
tion of a created nature is concerned in the liberty wherewith
creation shall grant Him what He requires. He would not
come, claiming His rights or using His prerogatives. Some-
times we have seen the tide pile up its weltering waves one
upon another, as if it were building a tower of water, before
some insignificant obstacle which the pressure of one rolling
billow would have driven before it far up the sounding
beach. This is a picture to us of the moment of the Incar-
nation. Innumerable decrees of God, decrees without num-
ber, like the waves of the sea, decrees that included or gave

• See HonoratuB Nicquetus, S. J. de Angelo Gabriele. Lyons, 1653.

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 69

forth all other decrees, came up to the midnight room at
Xazareth, as it were to the feet of that most wonderful of
God's creatures, with the resistless momentum which had
been given them from eternity, all glistening with the
manifold splendours of the divine perfections, like huge
billows just curling to break upon the shore; and they
stayed thefnselves there, halted in full course, and hung
their accomplishment upon the Maiden's word.

It was an awful moment. It was fully in Mary's power
to have refused. Impossible as the consequences seem to
make it, the matter was with her, and never did free creature
exercise its freedom more freely than did she that night.
How the angels must have hung over that moment ! With
what adorable delight and unspeakable complacency did not
the Holy Trinity await the opening of her lips, the fiat of
her whom God had evoked out of nothingness, and whose
own fiat was now to be music in His ears, creation's echo to
that fiat of His at whose irresistible sweetness creation itself
sprang into being ! Earth only, poor, stupid, unconscious
earth, slept in its cold moonshine. That Mary should have
any choice at all is a complete revelation of God in itself.
How a creature so encompassed and cloistered in grace could
have been free in any sense to do that which was less pleas-
ing to God is a mystery which no theology to be met with
has ever yet satisfactorily explained. Nevertheless the fact
is beyond controversy.

She had this choice, with the uttermost freedom in her
election, in some most real sense of freedom. But who could
doubt what the voice would be, which should come up
out of such abysses of grace as hers ? There had not been
yet on earth, nor in the angels' world, an act of adoration so
nearly worthy of God as that consent of hers, that conformity
of her deep lowliness to the magnificent and transforming
will of God. But another moment, and there will be an act

70 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

of adoration greater far than that. Now God is free, Marj
has made Him free. The creature has added a fresh Hberty
to the Creator. She has unchained the decrees, and made
the sign, and in their procession, like mountainous waves of
light, they broke over her in floods of golden splendour.
The eternal Sea laved the queenly creature all around, and
the divine complacency rolled above her in majestic peals of
soft mysterious thunder, and a God-like Shadow falls upon
her for a moment, and Gabriel had disappeared, and without
shock, or sound, or so much as a tingling stillness, God in a
created nature sate in His immensity within her Bosom, and
tlie eternal will was done, and creation was complete. Far
off a storm of jubilee swept far-flashing through the angelic
world. But the Mother heard not, heeded not. Her head
sank upon her bosom, and her soul lay down in a silence
which was like the peace of God. The Word was made
flesh.

Even to us in the retrospect it is a moment of unutterable
gladness. Love ponders it many times, when the world
presses heavily and life goes wearily. When all things, but
God, give way, because they are void and empty, and our
pursuits are like the coloured ends of rainbows, seen through
even while we pursue them, and always receding before us
as we advance, then we find such rest and such sufficiency
and such transcending calm in God, that love weeps over
the weakness of its own worship, and frets with a tranquil
fretfulness because it cannot love Him more. It is then
that the first act of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus rises
consolingly to our remembrance. It was a finite act, and
yet of value infinite. Then first was the blessed majesty of
God worshipped as it deserved to be. His glory lay out-
spread in all its broad perfection, in all its unembraced
immensity, and that first act of love embraced it. Its
worship was as broad as the uncomprehended breadth that lay

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 71

before it. To our thoughts, to the foolishness of our ventur-
ous thoughts as finite beings, there was something desolate
in that creatureless eternity of God It was not an uncom-
panioned life, because of the Three Divine Persons in One God.
But worship is our highest thought, and there is something
dreary in the idea of an unworshipped splendour, something
appalling, like a scene oppressively sublime, in an unwor-
shipped God. It is our own foolishness, our own littleness.
Yet what vent has love except in worship 1 We turn
from our own worship of God as beneath even the compla-
cency of our own vainglory. We think with joy of the saints
and of the angels, whose adoration reaches so much nearer
to the Throne. Mary's worship of God is all but rest to our
eagerness to see Him loved exceedingly and worthily. But
love's rest, love's sweet satiety, is in the worship of the
Sacred Heart, and there alone. So that, in the first moment
of the Incarnation, not only were the amazing decrees of
everlasting wisdom fulfilled, and creation with incredible
magnificence completed, but the creation thus completely
turned round as it were to the Face of the Creator, and
worshipped Him with a worship equal to Himself. When
the heart is sick because *' truths are diminished among the
children of men," and the weight of unintelligibly triumphant
and abundant sin lies heavy on it, and the mind is dragged
through thorny places till it bleeds, then the frightened soul
flies back to that moment of the first love of Jesus, and rests
there with the more full assurance and abiding calm, because
it knows that that first act of love is not ended yet. It has
stretched from that old midnight at ^N'azareth to this hour,
and is not weakened by the stretch. It can bear the weight
of millions of new creations. It will wear for untold eterni-
ties. Old as it is, it is new stilL It is unending. Its arms
are round the majesty of God, its kiss is on His feet, foi
evermore.

72 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

Thus had the Eternal Word begun His created life on
earth. He had taken possession of that fair home, which
He had predestinated for Himself from everlasting. He had
begun to live a life so full and broad and deep, that, if all
the lives of angels and men ran into one confluent stream,
they would make but an insignificant and impoverished rill
compared with the flood of real, enduring, solid, efiicacious
life which was His. It was a life without intermittence,
without experiments, without failures, without inequalities.
It was always at high-tide, always succeeding, always reach-
ing the ends at which it aimed, always fulfilling its purposes
in the loftiest manner. It was a life without advance,
without growth, beginning with its fulness both of science
and of grace. It was a life which had measures, but its
measures were practically immeasurable. Its worth was
infinite, even while it was not absolutely infinite itself. It
was a life also which comprehended all Kves both of angels
and of men, touched them, vivified them, ennobled them,
immortalised them. It ran over and abounded in mysteries,
in merits, in satisfactions. It was the perpetual plenary
indulgence of all other life that ever was. It was a life of
the most absorbed contemplation, and at the same time of
the most beneficent and heroic activity. It was a life of
incomparable intellectual excellence, of unsurpassed moral
wisdom, and of unexampled sanctity. It was a life so real
and so true, so self-conscious and substantial, creating, per-
fecting, consolidating so much, that all other life by the side
of it is but a shadow of life, a bare taking hold and letting
go again, a mere ineff'ectual clutching of the hands in sleep.
It was the life on which all noble, manful, divine lives were
to be modelled, and moreover it contained the energetic cause
and efficacious prophecy of all such lives within itself.

Such was the existence which began that night in Mary's
Bosom. If we look at it in the general, so as to get a view

THE BOSOM OF MARY, 73

of its characteristics, it seems to us, first of all, a life of
oblation. Worship was its predominant idea. Adoration
was the mould in which it was cast. It continually reflected
God. Yet it was not a private life, not a life which looked
only to God and itself, and so was sanctified. Its oblations
were not simply its individual worship of God, but they be-
longed to all creation, and were offered in its name.

They were coextensive with creation. They covered all
the ground which created worship could cover, and satisfied
all the claims of the Creator. In this life oblation was not
so much a distinct virtue, as the attitude of all its virtues.
Its destiny was that of a victim, and from its place and bear-
ing as victim it never stirred for one moment, not even when
it was working miracles. It contained within itself the
infinite materials of an infinite and endless sacrifice. The
business set before it was to consume these materials per-
petually for the glory of God. Thus it was incense, as well
as victim, incense ever rising up with all commingled aromas
of created sanctity, before the Throne on high. It was
always burning, and never burned itself away. Its human
soul was the thurible in which it was fragrantly consumed,
offered, asleep or waking, by night or day, with every pulse
of its human life. It was the priest also, as well as the
victim and the incense. With a divine bravery it slew itself.
It was incessantly slaying itself, and delighting in the slow
martyrdom. The unction of an eternal priesthood was upon
it, raising its self-sacrifice far above the level of mortal
heroism. The mere thought that created life, a human life,
should have reached the height which that life reached, is a
joy for ever.

This was the grand characteristic of the life, its posture of
oblation, its ever-smoking unconsumed sacrifice, its ministra-
tion at its own altar. Then it was also a life of imprisonment.
Broad, exulting, magnificent as it was, it was imprisoned.

74 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

It was imprisoned while it was outflowing over all creatioa
Confinement in the little created home of Mary's Bosom was
the lot of that which was almost infinite. Darkness was
around the life which was the beacon of all ages, the far-
reaching light of all created spirits. Obscurity environed that
life over which the angels were keeping jubilee, and which
was in God's eye as though it were no less than all creation,
including, comprehending, imaging, surpassing all. Its
energy needed not the limits of our activity. A cloistered
life among men may cover the whole earth with its activity,
if it be a life of worship, while the conqueror, the statesman,
or the man of letters have at most but a circle which they
only influence partially, and in which their influence is but
one of many influences. Worship alone is power, intellectual
power and moral power, the power of world-wide change and
of all beneficent revolution. We not only learn this lesson
from the life of confinement, which the Incarnate Word led
in Mary's Bosom, but it is that life which gives our life
power to become universal like itself.

It was a life of silence also. The great Teacher, the
utterer of the marvellous parables, the preacher of the world-
stirring sermons, the oracle whose single words have become
vocations, institutions, and histories, finds silence no bar to
the fertility of His action. Silence has ever been as it were
the luxury of great holiness, which implies that it contains
something divine within itself. So it is the first life which
He, the eternally silent-spoken Word of the Father, chooses
for Himself. All His after-life was coloured by it. In
His Childhood He let speech seem to come slowly to
Him, as if He were acquiring it like others, so that under
this disguise He might prolong His silence, delaying thus
even His colloquies with Mary. Mary also herself, and
Joseph, caught from Him, as by a heavenly contagion, a
beautiful taciturnity. In His eighteen years of hidden life,

THE BOSOM OF MARY, 75

silence still prevailed in the holy house of i!^azareth. Words,
infrequent and brief, trembled in the air, like music which
was too sweet for one strain to efface another, while the first
still vibrated in the listening ear. In the three years'
Ministry, which was given up to talking and teaching, He
spoke as a silent man would speak, or like a God making
revelations. Then in His Passion, when He had to teach
by His beautiful way of suffering, silence came back again,
just as an old habit returns at death, and became once more
a characteristic feature of His life. So now He, who was
the expressive eloquence of all the hidden grandeurs of the
Father, was mute and dumb in Mary's Bosom.

It was a life also of weakness. Helplessness, humiliation,
and a kind of shame were round about Him. He chose
them as His first created state. This choice was one of the
primary laws of the Incarnation, as a mission to fallen man.
He clung to it through the Three-and-Thirty Years. He
made it to be the supernatural condition of His Church, that
sort of continual triumphant defeat in which her life so
visibly consists. He perpetuated it for Himself in the
Blessed Sacrament. It was as if weakness was so new to
omnipotence, that there was an attraction in its novelty. To
show forth power in weakness, to be feeble and yet to be strong
also, and not only strong together with the weakness, but
actually because of it, — this was to display one of those
hidden and nameless perfections in God, which we should
perhaps never have seen except by the liglit of the Incarna-
tion, though by that light we see it now in nature also.

Yet what was the strength of all creation to that single
created weakness of His 1 AU the world's helpfulness was
but a ray out of His helplessness. No man's work, be it for
himself or for his fellows, has any true strength in it, no
man's strength is anything better than effort and gesticulation,
except the weakness of Christ have touched it, nerved it.

76 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

and made it manful with a heavenly manfulness. What are
half the literatures and philosophies in the world but gesticu-
lation, men in attitudes which effect nothing, voices raised
to screaming partly from irritation at the sense of impotence
and partly to save appearances and counterfeit strength by
noise 1 The strong man is he, who has gone deepest down
into the weakness of Christ. The enduring work is that
which Christ's humiliation has touched secretly, and made
it almost omnipotent.

His life in Mary's Bosom was also a life of poverty. This
is perhaps the most notable among all His predilectiona He
loved poverty among things, as He loved Mary among
persons. It was an acting out in the multiplicity of creation
the unity of the Creator. The soul is hampered by material
helps. Strength is in fewness. Work lies in singleness of
purpose. The victory is with him who has nothing to lose,
and if so be, needs less than the nothing he has got. Though
God Himself is untold wealth, riches are not godlike. For
it is not so much that God has wealth, as that He is His
own wealth. They are rich who possess God ; but they are
richest who possess nothing but God. All creation belongs
to him, to whom God is his sole possession. The idea of
wealth would uncrown Jesus in our minds, and desecrate the
sacredness of the Incarnation. Humanity, at its highest
point of holiness, is ever enamoured of poverty. Yet it was
almost more as God than as man that Jesus put riches away
from His Sacred Humanity. For His poverty went further
than created riches. Although He had so marvellously
endowed His human nature with the riches of the Godhead,
there were many mysterious ways in which during His whole
life, and especially in His Passion, He put aside from His
Sacred Humanity even the riches of His Godhead, and the
legitimate, we might have said inevitable, inheritance of the
Hypostatic Union, as if even that wealth were an encum-

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 77

brance. Look at the Eternal Word, first in the Bosom of
tlie Father, and then in the Bosom of Mary, and say whether
a lower depth of poverty can be conceived. Is it not one of
those things, which comes so nigh to a change in the Un-
changeable, that we hardly see how it is not a change ?

Such was the character of the life which God began to
lead in His own creation, as soon as ever He had assumed
His created nature. It is surely a most unexpected one, and
full of disclosures which take away our breath by their
divine strangeness. It is most deeply to be studied, giving
us as it does almost an insight into the interior of God, and
making us acquainted with Him in a different way from His
great attributes, of which theology takes direct cognisance.
Surely this life is a fact in history, more significant than all
its other facts put together; nay, rightly considered, it is
itself the true significance of those other facts. But let us
pass from His manner of life to His actual occupations, and
endeavour to construct a biography of the Eternal Word
during those Nine Montlis in Mary's Bosom.

His chief and sovereign occupation was in adoring God
as the author both of nature and of grace. His infused
science, in union with His incomparaOie holiness, rendered
His worship of God quite a distinct service from ours, though
it is both the cause and the example and the merit of ours.
It was a pouring out before God of multiplied infinities of
worship. He saw in their entireness the immeasurable
claims of God's glory, and He sent forth continuous streams
of worship to all points at once. He saw reasons we can
never see for adoring God, and He saw them also transcen-
dentally and eminently, and in a certain most true sense He
satisfied all of them to the full. He covered, and covered at
once massively and beautifully, every perfection of the Divine
Majesty with the pure gold of His oblation. This was His
incessant occupation. All other occupations centered in this.

78 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

resolved themselves into this, identified themselves with this,
It is the single occupation, of which the rest are manifold
developments. Hence also, as we shall see hereafter, He
occupied Himself with rejoicing in His created nature, and
not least of all because, by its seeing God clearly, it possessed
such an idea of worship, which the Hypostatic Union gave
Him the capabilities of satisfying.

Incessantly also was He sanctifying Mary with the most
marvellous operations of unitive love. She was penetrated,
as with innumerable arrows, by the constant, keen, effulgent
irradiations of His grace. Her whole being was saturated
with His. She was transformed into His image as no saint
has ever been. It is impossible for us to imagine how He
was occupied with her, or how her finite nature and limited
capacities gave Him so much to do. The variety of her
graces, as well as their eminence, is beyond our comprehen-
sion. Nevertheless He had been using His wisdom. His
power. His providence, His mercy, and His love, upon this
single planet of ours perhaps for millions and millions of
cycles of ages, advancing and developing His idea, like some
sublime workman, without changing or modifying, even
while He was variegating His original and irreformable con-
ception. So was it with the cosmogony of grace in Mary.
She had her epochs, and her generations, and her develop-
ments, in the long life of her sanctification, longer than it
can be counted by mere days and months ; only that in her
nothing passed away ; no graces became extinct. They grew
in size, and they multiplied in virtue. New species were
created in her constantly, but the old ones did not die away
either before the face of the new ones, or to make room for
them. She was a world, in which He occupied Himself
perpetually ; and, if His paradise was so beautiful to begin
with, tliat it drew Him down from the Father's Bosom, what
must have been His love of us which drew Him out af it

THE BOSOM OF MARY, 79

nine months afterwards, when by His own handiwork it had
become so unspeakably more beautiful ?

The government of the world was another of His occupa-
tions in the Bosom of Mary. Worlds far off in the stany
distances presented Him with innumerable occasions every
hour for His far-reaching providence. The countless meteors
that flashed through space were guided by Him. The ripen-
ing of invisible worlds, or worlds which from Nazareth
seemed but like a needle's point of unsteady light, and which
perhaps were one day to be the abode of rational creatures,
was presided over by Him, and none of its minutest details
was without Him. His influence was felt in incessant
vibrations all through the vast realms of space, while He lay
hidden in His obscure planetary residence in the Bosom of
Mary. In that same recess mighty effluxes of glory went
forth from Him, like the outpouring of an ocean through
ample straits, into the wide realm of angels. He managed
with minutest management the health and sickness, the joy
and sorrow, the fountains of thought and the energies of
action, of all the dwellers upon earth, who little deemed that
their centre and their cause was in the Bosom of a little
Hebrew maiden. He was already occupied in that created
home with our concerns of this far-distant age. He saw us
in the light of His redeeming love, and apportioned to us
that superabundant share of graces which we all feel that we
have received, graces more than sufficient many times over
to have secured our salvation. Already in that hiding-place
was He saving souls. Already did men feel in temptation
stronger helps of grace than they had felt before. Already
was there a light round deathbeds, which there had seldom
been in the elder times. Already did something like day
begin to dawn on those who lay in honest questioning
darkness.

In the Bosom of Mary also He entered upon His office of

8o THE BOSOM OF MARY.

judge. We know that He judges us, not as God, but as
man. It is one of the grandest prerogatives of His Sacred
Humanity. The grounds seem most insufficient for suppos-
ing that He delayed the exercise of this power until after
the Kesurrection. "VVe believe therefore that the first soul
that left its body after the moment of the Incarnation, and
thenceforth all departing souls, were solemnly judged by Him
in His created nature, and that for nine long months He held
His solemn assize in Mary's Bosom. Heaven also, and hell,
and purgatory, and limbus, felt Him as He waved His
Bceptre behind the curtain, pavilioned, true monarch of the
Orient as He was, in the fragrant inner chamber of His
Mother's life.

There are flowers which give out their perfume in the
shade, and grow more sweet as the sun mounts higher in the
sky. They lie hidden under cool beds of rank green herbage,
beneath the shadow of mighty trees ; and yet when the warm
air of the noon has heated the unsunny forest, these blossoms
fill the foliaged aisles with their prevailing incense. Their
odour gives a poetry and a character to the woodland scene,
and by that odour the spot lives in our memory afterwards.
Such is the sweet fragrance of St. Joseph in the Church,
stealing upon us unawares, perpetually increasing, and
especially filling with itself all the shades of Nazareth,
Bethlehem, and Egypt, but not reaching to the bare exposed
heights of Calvary. Throughout the Sacred Infancy St.
Joseph is the odorous undergrowth of all its mysteries. We
cause the perfume of his blossoms to rise up as we stir among
them ; and while we seem to be heeding it but little, because
the Mother and the Child are so visible and beautiful, never-
theless we should miss it, and stay our steps, and wonder, if
it were to cease.

Who can doubt but that His dear and chosen foster-father
vas another of our Lord's occupations in Mary's Bosom ? Of

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 81

all sanctities in the Church St. Joseph's is that which lies
deepest down, and is the hardest to see distinctly. We feel
how immense it must have been. The honour of Jesus, and
the office of St. Joseph towards His Mother and Himself, all
point to an unusual effusion of graces upon him, while the
lights, which transpire as it were through chinks in the
Gospel, indicate a most divine, and at the same time a most
deeply hidden life. At times we seem to see renewed in
him the character of one of the old patriarchs, especially
Abraham, when in his simple tent-life amidst the pastoral
solitudes of Mesopotamia ; or we are reminded of the first
Joseph, like the second Joseph by contrast, on the margin of
the Nile.

Then again there are glimpses which betoken the fashion
of New Testament sanctity, which make us hesitate in taking
the view, in many respects so fitting, that in him the Old
Testament holiness reached its highest and most beautiful
development, and so touched Jesus, and abode in the circle
of the Incarnation as representing that more ancient sanctity.
At any rate most marvellously must our Lord have enveloped
St. Joseph with light and love, and wrought diligently in
his soul with operations of the most astonishing and con-
summate grace. If magnificence is the inseparable accom-
paniment of all the divine perfections, there are none which
it accompanies in a more special, though at the same time a
hidden, manner than the attribute of justice : and it was
peculiarly from God's justice that the exuberance of St.
Joseph's graces proceeded. Who does not know the beautiful
munificence of gratitude even among the sons of men ? What
then must gratitude be like in God 1 The sanctification of
St. Joseph, the eminence of his interior beauty, must
represent it.

Our Lord as it were put HimseK under obligations to St.
Joseph, as well as in subordination to hiuL His fair and

82 THE BOSOM OP MARY,

spotless soul was the cloister built round Mary's innocence^
In his paternal fostering arms the Child was laid, who had
no father but the Eternal On Mary's score, and on Hia
own, how much had Jesus condescended to owe to Joseph !
His payment was in holiness. When therefore we think of
the offices for which he was paid, and who it was that paid
him, must we not confess that Joseph also was a world by
himself in the vast resplendent creation of grace, whose
beautiful light and fair shining in its huge orbit we perceive
with exultation, while it is hidden from us in its details by
the immensity of its distance, and also by the strangeness of
its phenomena, which will not altogether keep to our more
limited analogies 1 On him truly the Word in Mary's Bosom
spent much labour, in God's sense of labour, with jubilee of
love, and exultation in the glorious perfection and variety of
His loving work.

The peerless jewel of redeeming grace, that highest point
to which redeeming love ever attained, the Immaculate Con-
ception, had been effected by Him, when He dwelt only in
the Father's Bosom. In it He laid the foundation-stone of
His created home, being Himself external to it ; for it was
yet unbuilt. Since He had taken up His abode in Mary's
Bosom, His work on her had rather been the continuing and
perfecting of that adornment of her, in which we have already
seen the Holy Trinity specially engaged- In the soul of St
Joseph also His work had been eminently one of sanctifica-
tion, though of course sanctification through redeeming
grace.

But now, rejoicing like a giant to run His course, He will
signalise His advent by a work of sheer redeeming grace,
which should be second to none but the Immaculate Concep-
tion, unless indeed the same unrevealed privilege had been
accorded to St. Joseph. Hidden upon earth in His Mother's
^osom, like Himself, there is an unborn child, somewhat

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 83

older, indeed six months older, than Himself who is eternal
This child has been from everlasting elected to mighty things.
He has been chosen to be our Lord's Precursor. He is the
old world's second Elias, a burning as well as a shining light.
His destiny is so great that hitherto no man bom of woman
has had a greater ; and in some sense therefore was it greater
than St. Joseph's. St. Joseph perhaps was more deeply
imbedded in the divine light. God pressed him more closely
to Himself, as a mother almost hides her child in her bosom
by the closeness of her embrace ; while the Baptist was more
held forth at arm's length to men, that they might see his
light, and his light shine free and full upon them. This
child also is one of the "Word's primal ideas, and one of His
most beautiful elections, part of the gorgeous circle or hier-
archy of the Incarnation.

But at the present moment he lies in darkness. The stain
of original sin is on that soul so capable of such a mighty
indwelling of divine light. He is in the power of the evil
one. God's great enemy has a kind of dominion in him,
and, by the common laws of things, he must be born before
he will be capable of any merciful ordinance by which his
fetters can be broken, and he can be free to fly and nestle in
the Bosom of his Creator. The time of reason God in His
compassion will anticipate for the children of all those who
are in covenant with Him, but the time of birth He has
never yet anticipated for any one included in the decree of
sin, unless it was for the prophet Jeremias, and for St.
Joseph. By a wonderful untimeliness of mercy the unborn
Jesus will now go and redeem the Baptist gloriously, while
he too is yet unborn. The unincarnate Saviour redeemed
millions before His actual Incarnation, His Mother singularly
above the rest.

The incarnate but unborn Saviour too shall redeem millions
in those nine months, the unborn Baptist singularly above

84 THE BOSOM OP MARY,

the rest. Like a new pulse of impetuous gladness the Babe
in Mary's Bosom drives her forth. With swift step, as if
the precipitate gracefulness of her walk were the outward
sign of her inward joy, and she were heating time with her
body to the music that was so jubilant within, the Mother
traverses the hills of Juda, while Joseph follows her in an
amazement of revering love. Like Jesus walking swiftly
to His Passion, as if Calvary were drawing Him like a
magnet, so the staid and modest virgin sped onward to the
dwelling of Elizabeth in Hebron. The Everlasting Word
within trembled in the tone of Mary's voice, and the Babe
heard it, and " leaped in his mother's womb," and the chains
of original sin fell off from him, and he was justified by
redeeming grace, and the full use of his majestic reason was
given to him, and he made acts of adoring love such as never
patriarch or prophet yet had made ; and he was instantane-
ously raised to a dazzling height of sanctity, which is a
memorial and a wonder in heaven to this day ; and the
inspiration of the Holy Ghost thrilled through his mother
at the moment, and she was filled full of God, and her first
act, in consequence of this plenitude of God, was a worship-
ful recognition of the grandeur of the Mother of God ; and
all these miracles were accomplished before yet the accents
of Mary's voice had died away upon the air.

Straightway the Word arose within His Mother's Bosom,
and enthroned Himself upon her sinless heart, and borrowing
her voice, which had already been to Him the instrument of
His power, the sacrament of John's redemption. He sang the
unfathomable Magnificat, out of whose depths music has
gone on streaming upon the enchanted earth all ages since.

But what must a life of nine whole months have been,
when such occupations as these were but a moment's miracle 1
Almost always we may be sure that what we see of God is
less grand than what we do not see. He shows us what we

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 85

can bear, and strengthens us to see much which our weak
nature could never bear ; and yet after all it is little better
than the surface of His brightness, the back of His glory, as
Moses calls it, which we see. Even the grandeur, which
we see, we do not see in its real greatness, its absolute and
essential gloriousness. Yet how wonderful are these few
samples of the occupations of the Nine Months, which we
have been allowed to see ! If these are few, and superficial,
and not in their true depth comprehended by us, what must
have been the works of that active and contemplative life,
so full of reality, energy, substance, and accomplishment, as
we have already seen it to be ?

What must they have been in multitude, since these were
momentary; what in grandeur, since these lie within our
reach ; what in unknown wonders, of whose existence we
cannot dream, because they are so far down in God ? It
comes before us sometimes in confused sublimity at prayer.
Our eyes are turned upward, like the eagle's in its flight, yet
we feel that we are wheeling, nay almost resting, over an
abyss of unfathomable divine depth below, having seemed to
cross the edge from the firm land of faith in our fervour,
and unconsciously to intrude upon the happier land of sight.
But it is one of faith's gifts, and not its least, to find repose,
security, and the sense of home, precisely in the dark, vacant
magnificence of the mysteries of God.

Let us turn from this life in Mary's Bosom to her own
contemporary life. It too is full of God and of divine
significances, very needful to be contemplated, if we would
rightly understand the life of the Word within her. AH
the wide kingdoms of God's creation are fair to look upon.
There is not a single province of it, which is not so beautiful
as to fascinate the mind and heart of man. It is no wonder
men fall into such an idolatry of science. Even departments
of science, which concern themselves with the details of but

86 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

one section of creation, rather than a kingdom of it, can
readily so absorb the faculties of a large mind, as to make it
almost dead to other truth, blind to other beauty, and
incapable of other interests. The animal propensities of
men must be strong indeed to keep down intellectual idolatry
even to the pitch which it has attained in the present age,
when the alluring charms of science, with its broad regions of
exhilarating discovery, are taken into consideration. Surely
nothing but the better enchantment of God, the nobler spells
of spiritual wisdom, the emancipating captivity of divine
faith, can withstand the attractions of scientific research :
more especially in the case of the physical sciences, where
God's actual works are more immediately the objects of our
investigation, and not, as in the case of mental and moral
sciences, the systems in which other men have embodied
their puny views of what God has done. The contact with
God is less immediate in these latter sciences, and the very
phenomena have an uncertainty about them. The recesses,
in which physical science works, are more authentic divine
laboratories, where man's meddling has less overlaid God's
footprints, and the disturbing force of moral evil is less per-
ceptible. But if the physical sciences are, in our present
imperfect state, more attractive to most men than the mental
sciences, they in their turn must yield in interest and beauty
to the sciences which are divine. Theology is the proper
interpretation of all sciences. It is the central science in
which alone all sciences are true, and all sciences one. The
objects of faith, while they are more certain than any
phenomena, are also unspeakably more beautiful, because
they are divine, and more interesting, because we each
of us have an individual interest in them, and they con-
cern our eternity as well as our time. Theology has some
departments, which more resemble the physical sciences,
Buch as the treatises on God, the Holy Trinity, the Incama-

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 87

lion, and Beatitude ; others again are more akin to the

mental sciences, as the treatises on Grace, on Human Actions,

and on Laws, while the treatises on the Sacraments unite,

and often in a perplexing way, the characteristics of both.

But of all the kingdoms of God's creation, there are none,

the paradise of the Sacred Humanity excepted, to compare

with the interior of Mary's soul, the inward beauty, the

marvellous wisdom, the consummate graces of that chosen

queenly creature. We must try to bring before ourselves

some picture of her life during those Nine Months from the

Annunciation to the Nativity. She bore the Incarnate God

within herself. She had an unclouded consciousness of her

rank in creation. She possessed such a degree of infused

science, as enabled her more nearly to comprehend the vast

mystery within her than the most piercing intelligence in all

the realm of angels. She stood already upon a height of

sanctity, which no definitions can at all adequately express,*

so that there was a sense in which God found her worthy of

the sublimity of her exaltation. Like a material world being

fashioned and completed, so was she a spiritual world, grander

and broader than all material creation, being fashioned by

her Creator, and she was conscious of the unutterable process,

and adoringly passive under it, with the most meritorious

of all possible consents. She was placed even in a kind

of created superiority over Him, because she possessed the

rights of a Mother, and His physical life was dependent upon

her, and His possession of His Soul had hung for a moment

on her consent. Now can we at all put ourselves in the

* It is probable that our Lady had grace ex opere operato all the nine
months she bore our Lord. See Siuri. De Novissimis. Tract, xxxi. cap.
iv. sec. 76. Vega and Mendoza teach that she received grace ex opere
operato every time she touched our Lord : and Sister Agreda tells us
that the grace which she received In order to minister to her Son aright
was a special and distinct grace, and expressly communicated to her by
the Holy Trinity for that purpose, and not merely an exercise of tho
tommon virtues under which it would otherwise naturally fall.

88 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

position of such a creature ? Can we divine how she would
feel and act, how she would love, and hope, and believe, and
worship ? There must he guesses in all sciences. We
advance by guessing, as often as by discovery. All that is
needful is that our guesses should be in harmony with the
indubitable and authentic analogies of our science.

We must suppose then, that, short of the Beatific Vision
and also of the joys of the Sacred Heart, no creature ever
had a joy equal to the delight of Mary in possessing the
Incarnate God within herself, compassing the Incomprehen-
sible, exercising dominion over the Omnipotent, and being
united with Him, who is infinite Beatitude, in such a union
that His life and hers were one. Is it even clear that the
Beatific Vision is equal to this joy simply in the greatness of
the joy? From some points of view we should consider
Mary's bliss in this respect to be greater than many degrees
of the Beatific Vision j and still more, if, as some revelations
of the saints would seem to intimate, she did transiently,
and from time to time, during those nine months enjoy the
Beatific Vision also. But in kind at least this joy of hers
stands alone. None other is like it It is single in creation.
It is obviously a diff'erent joy from the Beatific Vision, be-
cause it is quite a different possession of God. It is as it
were the other side of our Lord's joy in His Sacred Heart,
which arose from the sense of His being the Creator, and
yet being in such a wondrous and singular union with a
created nature ; while the joy of Mary resided mainly in the
sense of her being a creature, and yet in such solitary and
peculiar relations to the Creator. It could not help but be
an exceeding joy, and yet it could not help also but be the
masterful unity of her whole life. It must not only have
coloured everything else ; but everything else must simply
have subsided into it It must have made every other com-
ponent part of life different, because of its sovereign presence.

THE BOSOM OF MARY. - 89

Yet Mary knew that it was only for a season. She was
conscious that the mystery must pass on into another, and
that His present state must give place to a new state. More-
over our Lord's mysteries did not merely change. They
rose as well as changed. They developed. They grew in
heauty, and had a multiplied significance. Thus her first
sight of His new-born Face at Bethlehem was a kind of
Beatific Vision for her to look forward to, something for her
still to desire, something which seemed to leave her present
joy incomplete, as well as transitory. Yet the enjoyment of
God, however transitory, is in another sense never incomplete.
Thus her bliss was like that of the Blessed in heaven, in so
far as it united in itself satiety and desire, the most complete
enjoyment, and yet a sweet insatiable hungering for more,
which last in her case was a certain expectation. She had
satiety ; for how could she be other than satisfied when she
possessed God within her Bosom, and possessed Him in such
a singular way, and with such a transcending reality j He
surely filled her nature, vast as its capacities were, to over-
flowing. Every pulse, that beat in her, reposed upon Him
in a way in which no creature out of heaven reposed on Him
before.

Yet her very satiety fed her intense desire. She yearned
for more, without being the less satisfied with what she now
enjoyed. A tranquil disquietude, a hungry contentment, a
restful craving, these are the contradictory expressions by
which we express to ourselves our own idea of her state.
To use the word of the Church, it was a state of " expecta-
tion," that beautiful and touching mystery in honour of
which she keeps a special festival, whereby she helps her
children to clothe themselves with some portion of the
grandeur of the Mother's mind, as fitting preparation for
celebrating the Son's Nativity.

In order to understand Mary's expectation, we must bring

90 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

before ourselves a picture of her mind, one falling far below
the original in brightness of colouring and in fulness of re-
presentation, yet such a picture as we can make for our-
eelves. No creature out of heaven, save the Soul of the
Babe within her, ever saw the Divinity so clearly as she ;
and she saw it, as none else can see it, substantially in her-
self, and physically compassed there. What must that be
which shall waken further expectations, when she is brood-
ing over such a sea of glorious light and speechless calm as
thati Moreover no doctor of the Church, not even the
apostles, comprehended the scheme of redemption, with all
its complicated graces, its magnificent disclosures of the
divine perfections, its marvellous compensations, its abundant
triumphs, the delicate machinery of its supernatural opera-
tions, more truly or completely than she did.

She took in at a glance its colossal proportions as a whole,
while she read off the ever- varying expressions of each linea-
ment of that mystery, which may be defined as the full Face
of God turned towards creation. The past history of the
world, with all its needs of a Saviour, lay before her, with a
divine light interpreting the entangled puzzles, which human
actions have printed upon it, and showing how tranquilly
God's glory is unravelling it all into the orderly and ornate
unity, in which it originally lay in the intention of the
Creator. The grand depths of Scripture were giving out to
her perpetually a magnificent wisdom, as if the inner folds
of the Divine Mind were being unrolled before her. The
schools of Athens would have been rich indeed, if they had
been endowed with one scintillation of the wisdom, which
out of the Hebrew oracles was falling evermore in showers
of light upon her. The Thirty-Three Years lay before her,
as a painted country with its provinces lies before us in a
map, and as she gazed upon the crowded vision, every faculty
of her soul was heroically clothed with the spirit of sacrifice

THE BOSOM OF MARY.- 91

and the enthusiasm of magnanimity. Shadows fell upou
her soul out of the cloudless skies of that vision, and hei
divine life deepened as ever and anon they passed upon her.

They, who have spent their boyhood among the mountains,
may remember the sacred awe which passed upon them, as
they lay upon the lonely heights, when under the blue and
cloudless heavens a strange shadow fell over them, and rested
vibratingly upon them, and yet they knew themselves to be
alone upon the mountain-top ; and at last they perceived that
it was some huge falcon or eagle in the sunny air, balancing
itself high up betwixt the sun and them, and gazing down
upon them, a shadow not wholly free from fear. Thus it
was with our Lady's dolours in the vision of the Three- and-
Thirty Years. They cast shadows, when there were no
clouds, as if, like birds of prey, they had been allowed to sail
through the unbroken brightness of that heavenly mystery.

She also saw before her in true perspective the future of
the Church, its trials, and its triumphs, and her own vast
influence in every age upon doctrine, devotion, and the out-
ward fortunes of the Holy See. With its millions of figures,
bearing their own blazonings with the sun full upon them,
it passed like a gorgeous procession before her, wonderfully
interpreted, as it passed, in the amazing soliloquies of her
own supernatural philosophy. She saw the battling forms
of darkness and of blood, in which the Church shall close
her terrestrial pilgrimage, ever fighting her way to her eternal
home, and engaged in the most dire of all her conflicts on
the very confines of the promised land, on the very eve of
the final doom. She looked on through the mists of time,
and all was clear to her. She saw the great world, rocking
almost off its equilibrium, not with material catastrophes, for
in matter all was lawful, meek, and uniform, but with moral
convulsions and mental revolutions. She saw it plunging
on through space, so unsteady that it seemed ever about to

02 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

fling the Church off from itself, as a beast shakes off an
uneasy load, or to swerve desolately from its spiritual. orbit,
80 that in some generations good men, that is, God's men,
should almost hold their breath in the terrible suspense of
some inevitable and yet incredible finality. She saw it
cleave through ages without precedent, through civilisations
without parallel. She saw how its life of ponderous revolu-
tions was one of lightning-like progress also, and there was a
recklessness about its moral speed, and a daring in the manner
with which it entangled itself in all manner of social compli-
cations, which might have depressed a seer less grand than
she was.

But no panic passed on her. The Babe within her was
stronger than the world. His tiny infant Hand, His thin
treble Voice, were enough to confine it in its groove, and to
speak peace to those warring elements of mind and will
which sin has thrown into ruinous combustion. Then at
last she saw the great wandering creation housed in its
Father's mansion, and bathed in the splendours of His eternal
love, through the Precious Blood made from hers, and whose
pulses she felt with unspeakable thrills throbbing within
her at that moment. To what emotions of thanksgiving,
to what hymns of praise, to what sciences in her soul which
were worships also, to what numberless unlanguaged and
unsung Magnificats did not all this give rise ? And yet she
was expecting something more !

Thus it was with the great Mother of God, still in the
dawn of her virginal youth. All created things had a new
meaning to her, now that they were governed from out of
her. Men's faces and actions were the language of a new
science to her, which philosophy might envy. Meanwhile
she was sensibly receiving graces from the Babe, and those
graces were unparalleled, not to be so much as imagined by
any of us, perhaps barely comprehended by hersell She

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 93

was consciously growing too in reverence and devotion to St.
Joseph, as the image of the Eternal Father. She was grow-
ing out of herself into her office, out of the daughter of Anne
into the Mother of God. The marvellous permitted intimacies
of the saints with God were as nothing to her colloquies, her
spiritual colloquies, with the Infant Jesus.

Yet with all this growth, her Expectation was growing also.
But what was her Expectation like ? It was a mystery of
incomparable joy. All godlike things are joyous. They
inherit joy by their own right. They sing songs in the soul
even amidst the agonies of nature. There is no making
them otherwise than joyous. They have touched God, and
so they carry with them an irresistible gladness everywhere.
They have an unquenchable sunshine of their own, which
the surrounding darkness only makes more startlingly bright.
The thorns of mortification thus become a bed of roses ; yet
not a thorn is blunted, nor is nature spared a wound. The
pains of martyrdom attune themselves to this inward jubilee,
and yet are pains as they were before. Now Mary's Expecta-
tion was full of God, and therefore it was joyous. It had
two intensities of joy in it : the intensity of created holiness
thirsting for the eight of God ; and the intensity of an
earthly mother's desire, natural, simple, and human, but
immensely sanctified, to see the Face of her Babe, whom she
knew to be God as well.

In the Scriptures the Face of God is spoken of as if it
were the magnet of creatures. There is no doubt that by the
word Face is commonly meant the Vision of God, together
with all sensible presences of Him, but especially the Vision
of Him. Men lived on sight. Faith was the soul's sight of
the unseen. It was the attraction of created sanctity to
yearn for the Face of the Creator, or rather such yearning was
itself sanctity. There are many faces of things in the world,
and almost all of them are very beautiful Even those,

94 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

which are not joyous, have a beautiful sadness about them.
There are frowning faces of things, expressions which sin
has brought over the countenance of nature, as age brings
wrinkles. Life too has weary-looking aspects ; yet in truth
there is nothing in life to weary us but sin, or the sinless
want of God. But all these faces of things, beautiful, or
beautifully sad, or dark and frowning, have all a look of
expectation upon them. Their features say they are not
final There is no resting in the best of them for any soul
of man. Even in an unfallen creation the face of things
would never satisfy the soul. There is a kind of infinite
capability about it, which glorious and lovely creations by
thousands might flow into for ever, and yet leave it an
everlasting void, an unfertile desolation.

The hidden Face of the Creator, the unveiling of that
hidden Face, — it was this for which men were to yearn. It
was the lesson life was to teach them, that there was no
true life away from the Vision of that blessed and beatifying
Face. Hence it is, that, when God has allured His saints
up to great heights of sanctity, beyond the cheering com-
panionship of creatures, into the frightening divine wastes
of contemplation, where nature finds only an echoing soli-
tude, and a wilderness of bristling rocks, and the dread of
preternatural ambushes. He visits them with visions, when
even their heroic courage is failing, and their hearts are
sinking within them. Such visions are like lights held out
on the shore to those who are fighting with the stormy
waters. They are disclosures beforehand, anticipations of
that abiding and full Vision, from which those often think
themselves furthest who are in truth drawing nighest to it.

It was thus that Mary yearned for that earthly beatific
Vision, the Face of the Incarnate God. She had doubtless
intellectual visions, as mystics call them, of the beauty of
the Sacred Humanity, before that night at Bethlehem. But

THE BOSOM OP MARY, 95

these would rather increase the burning of her desire, than
be a satisfaction to it. Transient sights of God — do not even
we know so much as that^ who are lowest in grace ? — only
stimulate the appetite of the soul. They quicken rather
than feed ; or if they feed, it is the craving of the soul which
they feed, rather than the soul itself. The awful nearness
of that vision, actually at the moment infolded within herself,
must have thrilled through her, as she thought of it. She
knew how that to her immense science that infantine human
Face of the Eternal Word would be an illuminated picture
of the divine perfections. It would be a new disclosure of
God to her, new as all God's disclosures of Himself are daily
to every souL She would gaze on that Countenance, whose
expressive beauty, even when it was mute and still, would, like
the voiceless music of light playing on the forest, the mountain,
and the sea, transparently display to her the workings of the
Sacred Heart. She was on the point of seeing that human
Face which was to light up aU the vast heaven for eternity,
and be to it instead of sun and moon. She was to drink
filial love and welcome and complacency out of the very
eyes, whose beams would pour everlasting contentment into
the millions of the Blessed round the throne. She was to
see this Face daily, hourly, momentarily for years. She was
to watch it broaden, lengthen, and grow larger, putting off
and taking on the expression of the successive ages of human
life. She was to see it in the seeming unconsciousness of
childhood, in the peculiar grace of boyhood, in the pensive
serenity of the upgrown man ; she was to see it in the rapture
of divine.contemplation, in the compassionate tenderness of
love, in the effulgence of heavenly wisdom, Ln the glow of
righteous indignation, in the pathetic gravity of deep sadness,
in the moments of violence, shame, physical pain, and mental
(^gony.

In each of its varying phases it was to her not less tlian a

96 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

revelation. She was to do almost what she willed with this
divine Face. She might press it to her own face in the
liberties of maternal love. She might cover with kisses the
lips that are to speak the doom of all men. She might gaze
upon it unrebuked, when it was sleeping or waking, until
she learned it off by heart. When the Eternal was hungry,
that little Face would seek her breast, and nestle there. She
would wipe off the tears that ran down the infant cheeks of
Uncreated Beatitude. Many a time in the water of the
fountain would she wash that Face, while the Precious Blood
mantled in it with the coldness of the water or the soft
friction of her hand, and made it tenfold more beautiful.
One day it was to lie white, blood-stained, and dead upon
her lap, while for the last time the old ministries of Beth-
lehem, so touchingly misplaced, would have to be renewed
on Calvary.

In this Face she would see a likeness of herself. She
would be able to trace her own lineaments in His. What
an overwhelming mystery for a creature, overwhelming
especially to her immense humility ! No other creature was
ever in like case on earth, nor ever will be. He will give
all of us His glorious likeness in heaven after the resurrec-
tion ; but she first gave to Him what He will give to us.
God gave her His own image ; she, as it were, returns it to
Him after another sort. His very likeness to His Mother
makes Him seem to fit more completely into His own
creation. In truth it was a Face of a thousand mysteries,
and she might well long to see it unveiled, and as it were
inaugurated among the visible things of earth. As a creature,
and as the highest of all mere creatures, she might long to
see it : but her longing as a mother was something more
than that When we have imagined to ourselves all that
we can imagine of the purity, intensity, and gladness of a
mother's love, we have still to remernber that she, who

THE BOSOM OF MARY. 97

longed to see her Child's Face, was the Mother of God, and
the Face she longed to see the Face of the Incarnate God.
Yet the human element of maternal love in its highest per-
fection must always remain in our minds as an ingredient of
her Expectation. Moreover the Vision, for which she was
yearning, was the vision of that same Face and Features
which the Eternal Word Himself had been looking at with
love, desire, and unspeakable expectation from eternity. It
was a dear vision which He had cherished and made much
of all through the creatureless eternity. So that Mary's
devotion to the sight of that blessed Face was one of those
shadows of eternal things, which were cast upon her from
out of God, as the mountains are imaged in the placid lake.

Such was her life of Expectation. It was a life of the
highest spiritual perfections, occupied with divine mysteries,
and anticipating celestial bliss. It was a life, which was
raising her sanctity hourly to greater heights of wonderful
attainment. It was a life of unearthly grandeur, absorbed
in God, and drawing its waters out of the deepest wells in
eternal things. It was a life without precedent, a Ufe inimi-
table, a life to which only silent thought can do any sort of
justice, and that in most inadequate degree. Yet withal
it was a life of extremely natural beauty, a life exceedingly
human. It was as if grace had become nature, rather than
superseded it The earthly element seemed to be that which
held it together, and gave it unity. It was feminine as well
as saintly. It was precisely its sanctity which appeared to
make it so exquisitely feminine. It was a possibility of
beautiful nature realised, by Him who is the author both of
nature and of grace. It was the canonisation of a mother's
love, in the light of which we see for a moment that deep
tenderness in God out of which maternal love proceeds, and
whose pure delights it adumbrates.

Thus her life, while it was contemporary with the life of

a

98 THE BOSOM OF MARY.

the Word in her Bosom, was a thoroughly human life, alto-
gether a created life, and as characteristically a created life
as the life of the Father, with the Eternal Son in His Bosom,
was an uncreated life. Of a truth it was often thus with
Mary, that, when she was most wonderful, she was then
most human ! It was so now ; it was so at the end of the
twelve years in the temple at Jerusalem ; it was so beneath
the Cross, with the dead Body lying on her lap. Her royal
womanly nature lent a grace to the very graces which adorned
her, and it was in the light of earth, which was round her
brow, that the jewels of her heavenly crown shone with the
sweetest, and even with the divinest, radiance. He, who
left heaven in quest of an earthly nature, has enhanced, not
overwhelmed, by His excess of glory the earthly beauty of
His Mother. Mary is not a thing, a splendour, a marvel, a
trophy ; she is a living person ; and therefore it is her nature
as woman which crowns her unspeakable maternity. God
has not overpowered her with His magnificence. Rather He
has given her distinctness by His gifts, and has brought out
in relief the beauty of a sinless nature. Her created maternal
love of the Incarnate Word is a substantial participation in
the Father's uncreated paternal love of the Coequal Word ;
and yet, among all the loves that are, there is no love more
distinguishably human than this love of hers.

But, peculiar and unprecedented as was this life of Mary,
her Expectation is nevertheless a beautiful rich type of all
Christian hfe. Jesus is in each of us by His essence, pre-
sence, and power, and is inwardly and intimately concurring
to every thought of our minds, as well as to all our outward
actions. His supernatural indwelling in our souls by grace
is a thing more wonderful than all miracles, and has a more
eflBcacious energy. An attentive and pious meditation on
the doctrine of grace positively casts a shadow over our
spirits, because of the greatness of our gifts and our dizzy

THE BOSOM OP MARY. 99

nearness to God, and we work under that shadow in hallowed
fear, those fearing most who love most. Through grace He
is continually heing bom in us and of us, by the good works
which he enables us to do, and by our correspondence to
grace, which is in truth a grace itself. So that the soul of
one, who is in a state of grace, is a perpetual Bosom of Mary,
an endless inward Bethlehem. In seasons, after Communion,
He dwells in us really and substantially as God and Man ;
for the same Babe that was in Mary is also in the Blessed
Sacrament. What is all this, but a participation in Mary's
life during those wonderful months 1

What comes of it to us is precisely what came of it to her,
— a blissful Expectation. We are always expecting more
holiness, more of Him in future years, new sights of His
Face in the stillness of recollection down in the twilight of
our souls ; and like Mary, we are expecting Calvary as well
as Bethlehem. Who is there before whose eyes at least a
confused vision of suffering is not perpetually resting?
What is past of life assures us that suffering must form no
trifling part of what is yet to come. Besides, we all have
prophecies of cares and troubles, and there is no sunshine
into which the tall ends of the shadows of coming sorrows do
not enter, and repose there with a soft umbrage which is
almost beautiful and almost welcome. At any rate there is
death to come, and that is a strait gate at its best estate.
But we are expecting also, as Mary was, the sight of our
Lord's Human Face. In all our time there will not be a
point more notable, more truly critical, than that at which
the Vision of His Face will break upon us. Our judgment
on the outskirts of the invisible world will be our Cave of
Bethlehem : for then first shall we really see His Face. Yet
even that sight will not altogether end our expectation ; for
we shaU take sweet expectation with us into purgatory,
where it will feed on the memory of that Divine Face which

lOO THE BOSOM OF MARY.

for one moment had been unveiled before us. After that,
there is a home close by the Babe of Bethlehem. It is out
Home as well as Mary's Home. It is an eternal Home ;
and there, and there only, we shall expect no more.

Such was the life of the Word in the Bosom of Mary ;
and such was the life of Mary, while the Word dwelt in her
Bosom. We have now to meditate on the last act of that
wonderful life. The nine months draw to a close, and
our Lord's last act is to journey from Nazareth to Beth-
lehem. It is towards us, as weU as towards Bethlehem,
that He is journeying. He is about to leave His home a
second time for the love of us. As He had left His uncreated
home in the Bosom of the Father, so is He now going to
leave His created home, that He may come to us, and be
still more ours. He will show us in this last action, that
He is not obedient merely to His holy and chosen Mother,
but that He has come to be the servant of our commands,
and to wait upon our frowardness. He journeys to Bethlehem
at the command of an earthly sovereign ; and although He
is a Jew, and for ages has loved, with a divinely obstinate
and most unaccountable predilection, His own people, He is
obeying now a foreign sovereign, who by right of conquest
is holding His people in subjection. He comes at the
moment when that foreign master is enumerating his subjects,
and making a census of the province, as if there was some-
thing which tempted Him on the occasion, and that His
humility hastened to seize upon the opportunity of being
officially and authentically enrolled as a subject the moment
He was born. Is it not strange that humiliation, to which
the creature has such an unconquerable repugnance, seems to
be the sole created thing which has an attraction for the
Creator 1

As He journeyed along the roads from Nazareth to Beth-
jf . '^^^^'^^j^em, all the while governing the world and judging men,

P USRARY

I

THE BOSOM OF MARY. loi

how little did the world suspect His presence in Mary's
Bosom t Could any advent come upon us more by stealth
than this? Even the unnamed midnight, when He will
break upon us from the east and summon us to the final
doom, will hardly come more like a thief in the night, than
when He came to be bom at Bethlehem. There is no sign.
Mary's face tells nothing. Joseph is evermore in silent
prayer. It is wonderful how taciturn and secret people
grow, when they come near God, Yet everywhere there is
that impatience, which we have so often observed in the
things of God, that strange mixture of slowness and precipita-
tion, which characterises the execution of His purposes.

What is the fire that burns in Mary's Expectation, but a
heavenly impatience ? Even Joseph's tranquillity is not
insensible. His is too divine a heart to be insensible. He
also, with his will laid alongside the will of God, is impatient
for that hour of gladness, which is to make the very angels
break forth from the coverts of their hidden life into audible
and clamorous song. The hot and uneasy heart of the
world, burdened, in the dark, seeking and not finding, is
impatient for its deliverer. The unwearied angels are love-
wearied, waiting for their Head, whom they expect the more
eagerly now that they have seen the glorious holiness of their
human Queen. The Father is, if we may dare to say it, ador-
ably impatient to give His only-begotten Son to the world,
to take His place among visible creatures. The Holy Ghost
bums to bring forth into the light of day that beautiful
Sacred Humanity, which has been especially of His ovm
fashioning. The Word Himself is impatient now for Beth-
lehem, as He will hereafter confess Himself to be for Calvary.
Meanwhile we, we ungenerous sinners, who know ourselves
to be what we are, are actually part of His attraction. We
are helping to hasten on this stupendous mystery. It is we
who by our littleness and our vileness are making the incred*

I02 THE BOSOM OF MARY,

ible love of God so much more incredible, that it is only a
divine habit of supernatural faith which can reach so far as
to believe it.

Let us look at Him once more in Mary's Bosom. How
beautifully He nestles there! An eternity of purpose has
come to its fulfilment there. An eternity of desire has found
contentment there. Has He really left the Bosom of the
Father for the greater attraction of the Bosom of the
Creature ? So we indeed are obliged to express ourselves ;
yet, if we look up, He is there also, there always. He has
never left the Bosom of the Father ; for He never could leave
it. He would not be God were He so much as free to leave
it. Yet is He not the less in Mary's Bosom now, preparing
soon to leave it, and to be cast forth as a heavenly exile amidst
visible created things, unknown, unrecognised, as Maker
and Lord of all, nay, even rejected, disesteemed, excommuni-
cated, and His human life violently taken from Him, aa
though He were unworthy to be part of His own Creation.

The sun sets on the twenty-fourth of December on the
low roofs of Bethlehem, and gleams with wan gold on the
steep of its stony ridge. The stars come out one by one.
Heaven is empty of angels, but they show not their bright
presences up among the stars. Rude men are jostling God
in the alleys of that oriental village, and shutting their doors
in His Mother's face. Time itself, as if it were sentient,
seems to get tremulous and eager, as though the hand of its
angel shook as it draws on towards midnight. Bethlehem is
at that moment the veritable centre of God's creation. Still
the minutes pass. The plumage of the night grows deeper
and darker. How purple is the dome of heaven above those
pastoral slopes, duskily spotted with recumbent sheep, and
how silently the stars drift down the southern steep of the
midnight sky 1 Yet a few moments, and the Eternal Word
will come.

C 103 )

CHAPTER IIL

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE,

Childhood is a time of endless learning. It learns at play,
as well as at school. Its lessons hardly teach it more than
its idleness. It observes without knowing that it observes,
and imitates without suspecting that it is not original It is
the strangest mixture of the restless and the passive, always
moving yet always brooding also. There are few men who
will ever in after-life be half so contemplative as they were
amidst the changeful and capricious activities of childhood.

There are many harvests in a lifetime, but there is only
one seed-time ; and all the crops are sown in seeming confu-
sion at once, yet come up in an orderly succession which
betokens law, not uninfluenced by circumstances. After-life
is the theatre on which childhood produces its spectacles one
after another, like so many dramas, whose lightness or sad-
ness, beauty or harshness, tell recognisable tales of birth-place
and its scenery, of early schools with their dark and bright,
of the impress of a father's mind, or the moulding of a
mother's skilful love, of the grave touches of a brother's
affectionate influence, or the ineffaceable memories of an
idolatrous sister's touching partisanship. But, as life goes
on, it is above all things the father's influence which manL
fests itself more and more. The voice takes his tone, the
gait his peculiarity. Many little ways unconsciously develop
themselves, which have never been remarked in past years,

I04 THE MIDNIGHT CA VE.

and can now be hardly an intentional imitation of one who
has been in his grave for a quarter of a century. The old
family home is renewed, and they that remember old times
look on with smiles and tears, both of which are at once
painful and pleasant, because they raise the dead, and put
new life and colour into memories that were fading away in
grey time.

Now all this may be applied to the subject of religion.
What childhood is to after-life, so far as this world is con-
cerned, this life is to the life to come. We are always
learning, and learning more than we suspect. If we are
earnestly striving to serve God, we are observing Him when
we do not think of it. Our likeness to Him is growing, like
a family likeness in a child, sleeping or waking ; and its
progress is hardly noted.

We are conscious of it only at intervals. Our nature
is becoming secretly and painlessly supernaturalised, even
at moments when the painful efforts of mortification may
happen to be comparatively suspended. God's ways are
passing into ours, though for the present it is all under the
surface ; and not unfrequently appearances are even the
other way. Sometimes, as we advance in the spiritual life,
we are taken by surprise at finding how much more deeply
heavenly principles have sunk into us than we had supposed,
and how, almost intuitively, we put ourselves on God's side,
take His view of things, and even in a far-off way imitate
what we may reverently term His style of action. Long daily
intimacy with our Heavenly Father is beginning to tell upon
us. Habits of childlike reverence are almost implicitly
habits of filial imitation. Great results follow even on this
side the grave ; but surely much greater ones will follow on
the other. The degree of our likeness to God there may
depend more than we suppose on the secret undergrowth of
that likeness here. As childhood's best harvests are those

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB, 105

which come latest in life, so may it be that our imitation of
God may not merely secure our bliss hereafter, but may give
a character to our blessedness, and exercise no little influence
over it for ever.

At any rate the mere observation of God is of immense
importance to our sanctification. To see Him at work, even
without our endeavouring to imitate Him, is in itself a
sanctifying process, and one too which, as a matter of fact,
will never rest in itself, but sooner or later will issue in real
imitation. Principles of celestial beauty grow into us, and
mould us with quiet vehemence, just as exquisite models
make artists ; and time and love are all the while doing a
joint work deeper down in us than we can see ourselves. To
watch God seems to put a new nature into us. "We grow
like Him by seeing Him, even in the twilight of this Arctic
world. We turn away from the sight of Him for a moment,
and lo! all things look unbeautiful, because God is not
there. We have already watched Him bring forth His
decrees from their eternal hiding-place in His mind, and
gently lead them to execution ; let us now see how He will
fling open the doors of His own concealment, and take visible
possession of His kingdom. This must be the one idea of
the present chapter, God's way of manifesting Himself after
being so long invisible, nay, from the first invisible, invisible
till now. A filial creature can hardly see his Heavenly
Father's behaviour in critical circumstances and at a solemn
time, and not himself grow heavenly thereby.

There have been many wonderful pictures on this earth.
The sorrows and the joys of men have brought about many
pathetic occurrences, while their virtues and their vices have
led to many catastrophes of the most thrilling dramatic
interest. Indeed, the constantly intersecting fortunes of men
are daily acting tragedies in real life, which, like the too
faithful sunset of the painter, would seem in fiction to be

lo6 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

unreal and exaggerated. There have been many mysteries
too on earth, in which man was comparatively passive, and
God acted by Himself, times when the Creator Himself has
been pleased to fill the whole theatre of His own creation,
times also, as in the cool evenings of Eden or at the door of
Abraham's tent, when He has mingled with marvellous con-
descension among His creatures. But earth has seldom
witnessed such a scene as Mary, and Joseph, and the Eternal
Word, in the streets of Bethlehem at nightfall.

The cold early evening of winter was closing in. Mary
and Joseph had striven in vain to get a lodging. St. Joseph
was such a saint as the worid had never seen heretofore.
Mary was above all saints, the first in the hierarchy of
creatures, the queen of heaven, whose power was the
worthiest similitude of omnipotence, and who was the
eternally predestinated Mother of God. Within her Bosom
was the Incarnate God Himself, the Eternal Word, the
Maker and Sovereign of all in Bethlehem, the actual Judge
of every passing soul that hour. But there was no room for
them. The village was occupied with other things, more
important according to the world's estimate of what is
important. The imperial officers of the census were the
great men there. Rich visitors would naturally claim the
best which the inns could give. Most private houses would
have relations from the country. Every one was busy.
This obscure group from Nazareth, that carpenter from
Galilee, that youthful Mother, that hidden Word, there was
no room for them.

They did not even press for it with enough of complimen-
tary importunity. It is not often that modesty is persuasive.
A submissive demeanour is not an eloquent thing to the
generality of men. If God does not make a noise in His
own world. He is ignored. If He does, He is considered
unseasonable and oppressive. Here in Bethlehem is the true

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE, 107

Caesar come, the monarch of all the Roman Csesars*, and
there is no room for Him, no recognition of Him. It is His
own fault, the world will say. He comes in an undignified
manner. He makes no authentic assertion of His claims.
He begins by putting Himself in a false position ; for He
comes to be enrolled as a subject instead of demanding
homage as a sovereign. This is His way, and He expects us
to understand it, and to know where to look for Him, and
when to expect Him. There was even a shadow of Calvary
in the twilight which gathered round Bethlehem that night.
Just as no one in Jerusalem would take Him in during Holy
Week, or give Him food, so that He had each night to retire
to Bethany, in like manner no one in Bethlehem will take
Him in, or give Him a shelter beneath which He may be
born.

To all but its Creator the world makes no difficulty of at
least a twofold hospitality, to be bom and to die, to come
into the world and to go out of it. Yet how did it treat
Him in both these respects? He was driven among the
animals and beasts of burden to be born. That little village
of the least of tribes said truly it had no room for the
Immense and the Incomprehensible. Bethlehem could not
indeed hold her, who held within herself the Creator of the
world. There was an unconscious truth even in its inhospi-
tality. He was to be born outside the walls of Bethlehem,
as He died outside the walls of Jerusalem. Thus He had
truly no native town. The sinless cattle gave Him ungrudg-
ing welcome, and an old cavity in the earth, fire-rent or
water-worn, furnished Him with a roof somewhat less cold
than the starry sky of a winter's night So far as men were
concerned, it was as much as He could do to get bom, and
obtain a visible foothold on the earth. So He was not
allowed to die a natural death. His life was trampled out
of Him, as something tiresome and reproachful, or rather

lo8 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

dishonourable and ignominious. He was buried swiftly,
that His Body might not be cumbering the earth, polluting
the sunshine, or offending the gay city on the national
festival. And all the while He was God ! These are old
thoughts, but they are always new. They grow deeper, as
we dwell upon them. "We sink further down into them, as
we grow older. Every time we think them, they so take us
by surprise that it is as if we were now thinking them for
the first time. No words do justice to them. The tears of
the saints are more significant than words ; but they cannot
express the astonishing mystery of this inhospitable Beth-
lehem, which will not give its God room to be bom within
its walls.

Alas ! the spirit of Bethlehem is but the spirit of a world
which has forgotten God. How often has it been our own
spirit alsot How are we through churlish ignorance for
ever shutting out from our doors heavenly blessings ! Thus
it is that we mismanage all our sorrows, not recognising
their heavenly character, although it is blazoned after their
own peculiar fashion upon their brows. God comes to us
repeatedly in life, but we do not know His full face. We
only know Him when His back is turned, and He is depart-
ing after our repulse. Why is it that with a theory almost
always right, our practice should be so often wrong 1 It is
not so much from a want of courage to do what we know to
be our duty, although nature may rebel against it. It is
rather from a want of spiritual discernment. We do not
sufficiently, or of set purpose, accustom our minds to super-
natural principles.

The world's figures are easiest to count by, the world's
measures the most handy to measure by. It is a tiresome
work to be always looking at things from a different point
of view from those around us ; and, when this effort is to be
lifelong, it becomes a strain which cannot be continuous :

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 109

and it only ceases to be a strain, by our becoming thoroughly
supernaturalised. Thus it is that a Christian life, which has
not made a perfect revolution in a man's worldly life, becomes
no Christian life at all, but only an incommodious unreality,
which gets into our way in this life without helping us into
the life to come. Hence it is that we do not know God
when we see Him. Hence it is that we so often find our-
selves on the wrong side, without knowing how we got there.
Hence it is that our instincts so seldom grasp what they are
feeling after, our prophecies so often come untrue, our aims
so constantly miss their ends. God is always taking us by
surprise, when we have no business to be surprised at alL
Bethlehem did not in the least mean what it was doing. No
one means half the evil which he does. Hence it is a grand
part of God's compassion to look more at what we mean than
what we do. Yet it is a sad loss for ourselves to be so blind.
Is it not, after all, the real misery of life, the compendium
of all its miseries, that we are meeting God every day, and
do not know Him when we see Him 1

Nothing can trouble the inward peace of those who are
stayed on God. If a gentle sadness passed over Joseph, as
he was repulsed from house after house, because he thought
of Mary and of the Child, he doubtless smiled with holy
peacefulness when he looked into her face. The unborn
Babe was rejoicing in this foretaste of His coming humilia-
tions. Each unsympathetic voice that spoke, the noise each
door made as it was closed against them, was music in His
ear. This was what He had come to seek. This, almost
more than the virginal purity of Mary's Bosom, was what
had drawn Him down from heaven. It was the want of this
which had made the Father's Bosom lacking in something
which He craved.

Doubtless Mary and Joseph, who knew Him so well
already, and were versed in His unearthly ways, shared

no THE MIDNIGHT CAVB.

somewhat in this His exultation. It was plain there was to
be no home there. They knew how to excuse each refusal.
They, in their unselfishness, were almost ashamed to ask a
hospitality, which the exquisite considerateness of their
charity made them see might be thought unseasonable in the
crowded condition of the town. They would be pained to
put others to the pain of refusing them. They would only
ask because it was a duty to ask, and they would not ask
twice anywhere. Oriental hospitality is common as the
flowers of the field ; but we have seen enough of the world
now to know, that even the commonest services are more
than God is expected to demand ; and that what is common
for others is rare for Him. They quit the town therefore
in sweetness, patience, and love, leaving a blessing, aa
unbought as it was unsuspected, behind them. It is not
infrequent for God to leave a blessing even when He is
rejected ; for His anger is so gentle, that sin must have gone
far indeed, before His unrequited love becomes dislike. Yet
His blessings are strange, and sometimes wear the aspect of
a punishment, as perhaps the women of Bethlehem thought
when they became the mothers of martyrs, and were ennobled
by their children's blood.

The twilight deepens. Mary and Joseph descend the hilL
They find the Cave, a Stable-Cave, a sort of grotto with an
erection before it, so common in those lands, by which depth
and coolness are both attained. The Arab builds by prefer-
ence in front of a cave, because half his dwelling is thus
built for him from the first. The cavern seems to draw
them, like a spell. Souls are strangely drawn, and to
strangest things and places, when once they are within the
vortex of a divine vocation. There are the lights, and songs,
and music of the crowded village above them, turning into
festival the civil obligation which has brought such unwonted
numbers thither. Beneath that gay street, a poor couple

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE. in

from Nazareth have sought refuge with the ox and ass in
the stable.

What is about to happen there 1 It must be differently
described, according to the points of view from which we
consider it. Angels would say that some of God's eternal
decrees were on the eve of being accomplished in the most
divine and beautiful of ways, and that the invisible King
was about to come forth and take visible possession of a
kingdom, not narrower than a universe, with such pomp as
the spiritual and godlike angels most affect. The magistrate
in Bethlehem would say, that, at the time of the census, a
pauper child had been added to the population by a houseless
couple who had come from Nazareth, noting perhaps that
the couple were of good family but fallen into poverty.
This would be the way in which the world would register
the advent of its Maker. It is a consistent world, only an
unteachable one. It has learnt nothing by experience. It
registers Him in the same manner this very day.

Let us go forth upon the slopes, and watch the night
darkening, and think of the great earth that lies both near
and far away from this new and obscure sanctuary, which
God is about to hallow with such an authentic consecration.
Much of earth is occupied with Koman business. Couriers
are hastening to and fro upon the highways of the empire.
The affairs of the vast colonies are giving employment and
concern to many statesmen and governors. The great city
of Kome itself is the centre of an intellectual and practical
activity, which makes itself felt at the furthest extremities
of the empire. Upon some minds, and especially those of a
more philosophical cast, the growth of moral corruption, and
other grave social questions, are weighing heavily. There
are lawyers also intent upon their pleadings. Huge armies,
which are republics of themselves, are fast rising to be the
lawless masters of the world.

112 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

But nowhere in the vast world of Roman politics does
there seem a trace of the Cave of Bethlehem. No prophetic
shadows are cast visibly on the scene. All things wear a
look of stability. The system, ponderous as it is, works
like a well-constructed machine. No one is suspecting any-
thing. It would not be easy for the world to be making less
reference to God than it was making then. No one was on
the look-out for a divine interference, unless it were that
here and there some truth-stammering oracle perturbed a
narrow circle, whose superstition was the thing likest religion
of all things in the heathen world. In the palace of the
Caesars, who suspected that unborn Caesar in His Cave?
How often God seems to give nations a soporific, just when
He is about to visit them, and the appearance of it is not so
much that of a judgment upon them as of a jealous desire to
secure His own concealment !

There is a Greek world also lying within that Roman
world. It is a world of intellect, and thought, and disputa-
tion, the honourable trifling of the conquered, the refuge of
those whose national independence has passed away. Many
a brain is spinning systems there. Many find life full and
satisfactory in the interest of a barren eclecticism. There is
a populous world of countless thoughts, and yet how few of
them for God ! Everywhere there is a grandeur of disfigured
truth, everywhere magnificent tokens of what reason can
achieve, coupled with sad indications of what it fails to do.
But the strongest systems are to be broken into a thousand
pieces by the unborn Sage who is hidden in that Cave. His
philosophy will be antagonist to theirs. The Christiau
child of modern Bethlehem has more in his catechism than
Plato ever could divine, together with a practical wisdom
which the Stoic might envy and admire. The world of
philosophy needed the Babe of Bethlehem. But it was not
conscious of its need, neither did it suspect His coming ;

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE, 113

neither, though it had sought truth these hundreds of years,
would it know Truth when He came and looked it in the
face. The wind is sighing through the leafless plains on the
borders of the Hyssus : but who dreams there, that, when
midnight comes, the Unknown God of the dissatisfied
schools of Athens will be a speechless Child upon the
earth t

Bound about, there is a nearer and a narrower world of
Jewish uneasiness. A conquered nation is a tiresome
spectacle. But never is it so disheartening as when it is
tossing in unhelpful and inefficacious sedition without rising
to the heroism of a crusade for freedom. So was it with the
Jewish world that night. The census would doubtless let
loose much futile talk about the Machabees, among those
who did not enjoy the incomes of Roman office. There was
ungraceful obedience to the foreigner, and the burning heat
of old memories. There were the intrigues of domestic
factions, and the littleness of a shadowy nationality, to
which a grievance was more precious than the manly patience
that waits the right hour to strike the blow for liberty.
Like all uneasy nations, the Jews were looking out for a
deliverer, and dreaming every moment that they had found
him. But their discernment was gone. They were blinded
by the very spiritual magnificence of their ancient prophecies.
They were looking in all directions rather than towards the
Cave of Bethlehem ; and, when Messias came, He was their
scandal rather than their hope ; and, while they shed their
own blood for pretenders, they spilt the blood of their true
King in disappointment and disgust. The gorgeous martial
procession, which was to go forth to conquer and redeem the
world, will issue from the Cave of Bethlehem, when forty
days are passed; but the fallen people have no eye to
recognise the celestial splendour of that new manner of war-
fare, whose triumphs are in the depths of its abasement.

114 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

The new Machabee is not according to their reading of the
national traditions.

Or let us take another scene. The nations of the earth
have greatly changed since then. But look at that unchang-
ing empire, that highly-wrought and yet ungrowing civilisa-
tion, of the Chinese, the empire that as if in sport had taken
to itself the title of celestial because its genius is so eminently
and so exclusively material. Look along those brimming
rivers which are made to irrigate a myriad gardens, and to
spread incessant verdure over plains almost tapestried with
ornamental patterns of minutest cultivation. Look at those
quaint mountains delved into slopes and terraces, with every
basketful of earth economised, and every trickling moisture
curiously hoarded. See how the realm teems with human
life, till there is scarcely any room left for any other life than
that of men, and how imperiously, and yet how grotesquely,
tradition, law, and custom have parcelled out and organised
and perfected that human life ! The very throng of the
thickly congregated bodies drives our minds painfully on the
thought of such innumerable souls, densely crowded souls
that are single to the eye of God, souls perishing for the lack
of the Precious Blood.

China has bred in our little faith and little love more hard
thoughts of God than all the other nations of the earth
besides. We ponder in a puzzled way over that enormous
hive of human life, where age has followed age, and God is
still unknown. How little did it feel the need of a Kedeemer
on that December night ; how little does it feel it now !
Perhaps no nook of earth has changed less than that huge
empire seething and surging with incredible masses of popula-
tion. As it was then, so is it now, wise and yet so ignorant,
strange and yet so practical, civilised and yet so rude,
promising and yet so hopeless, so far advanced and yet so
singularly backward, so undecaying and yet in such irrecover-

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE, 115

able decadence. Blood has flowed there for Christ ; yet ia
it the only blood of martyrs which has not yet been visibly
the seed of a future Church. If anywhere on earth we can
see unaltered what we might have seen that first Christmas
Eve, it is in that strange, attractive, vexatious, disappointing
land. As the winter stars shone unconsciously that night
on the hurrying currents of those turbid rivers or in the
stagnant pools of the rice- fields, so were the hearts of the
dwellers there unconscious then, so are they almost uncon-
scious now. It is chiefly the speechless unconscious babes *
of China that are the sweet prey of the Babe of Bethlehem,
an artifice of grace which almost looks as if it stooped to
suit itself to the condition of the land it fain would bless.

There was the world also of the barbarians, wandering or
fixed. The rude cradles of modern civilisation were already
seething with numbers by the Sea of Azof, or beyond the
Danube, or amid the pine woods of Sarmatia. There were
nations which were evermore at war, nations sunk almost to
the level of the lower animals, nations with a hundred
religions, all of them fierce, sanguinary, abominable, degrad-
ing. Our own ancestors, stained with deep dyes, were in
their earthen huts that night amid the withered fern and
moonlit hollies of their native chases. That very night of
the twenty-fourth of December the Mexican tribes near the
Gulf of California were wandering about the woods and
sandy dunes, dressed in the skins of beasts and the plumage
of large birds, and imitating their voices, keeping the eve of
the grand festival of the Sun's nativity on the twenty-fifth,
at whose first beams they would fling off their savage mas-
querade, and bless the god of the sun who had raised them
above the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, and
made them men. When the first cry of the Infant Jesus

* In allusion to the work of the Sainte Enfance for the baptism of
Chinese children.

Il6 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

Bounded in the Cave, the melancholy splashing of those fai
western waters was mingled with the imitated howls of beasts
in that strange typical festival of heathenism. There was
need for the Babe of Bethlehem among these unshepherded
multitudes of God's dear creatures, who were trying to draw
near to Him in these dark, wild ways. But they heard not
that angelic music in the skies, which was one day to charm
them from their ferocity, and bow their heads in childlike
awe at the Name of Jesus, and make their strong frames
tremble at the gentle shock of the baptismal waters.

Wherever we look, to Rome, to Greece, to Jewry, to
China, or to the Barbarians, the picture is the same. There
is everywhere a fearful indifference to the things of God,
everywhere an unconsciousness of His vicinity, an unsuspect-
ingness that His marvellous interference was so near at hand.
Each hour of that night was being laden by men with its
own tremendous burden of malignant sin. As the sands of
the glass or the drops of the water-clock ran through, the
nations of earth were unthinkingly filling up the foreseen
measure of iniquity, which the sole virtue of Mary's Immacu-
late Heart is precipitately cutting short, through her having
merited that the hour of the Incarnation should have been
anticipated. Perhaps the secret few, those whom Simeon
and Anna represent, have sweet unwonted perturbations in
their prayers, those divine perturbations which so strangely
deepen inward peace. It is thus that His servants often
know when God is drawing nigh, and from what quarter He
will come. Moreover the prayers of the saints are the nearest
approach to a disclosure of the secret operations of God. He
inspires them to pray for the coming of those things which
He Himself is on the point of revealing. Perhaps all men
in earnest prayer are more inspired than they suppose. If
we could at any time see the hearts of the saints, we should
come nearest to a sight of the Invisible God, the Beatific

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE. 117

Vision excepted. So doubtless on that night images of the
mysteries of Bethlehem were mirrored on the souls of some,
who knew not the significance of the heavenly beauty which
was alluring and fortifying their inward lives. Meanwhile
birth and death were going on as usual, and the passing souls
were judged, as usual, by the unborn Child.

But there is one feature of the scene which must not be
omitted. It is the quiet order of the elements, and their
uninterrupted sameness. It is like God that it should be so.
The night-wind rose among the low hills as it always rose.
The stars leapt into their places, one by one, the brightest
first, as the darkness of the night increased. The dusky
features of the landscape wore the same physiognomy as
usual, in the indistinctness of the quiet night. There was a
look of unmovedness, of independence, of want of sympathy,
in the face of nature, which was out of harmony with the
expectation of the creature or the near approach of the
Creator.

The scenery was unconcerned. It was as if nature stood
on one side, and let God pass, and made no obeisance, and
altogether had nothing to do with what was going on, as if
it was a world by itself, and did not interest itself in the
worlds of spirit and of will. Has not this sometimes hap-
pened to ourselves in life ? When a friend has died in the
night, we may have opened the casement and looked out
into the clear darkness. Our hearts are full. It seems as if
all hearts were in our one heart. We almost dream that at
that moment we monopolise in our single selves and in our
new sorrow all the interests on earth. We look out upon
earth, as if its silence would answer what we are feeling.
But the moon is mockingly bright ; there is the not unmusical
moaning of the night- wind ; the birds are restless upon theil
roosts. Whoever knew them not so in moonlight ?

All is as usual The lineaments of nature are expression-

Il8 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

less. There is plainly no sympathy there with our sorrows,
our fears, our hopes, or our regrets. We look to Nature;
but her blank unresponsive face, happily, yet not without
some unexpected rudeness, flings us back on God. There
was an earthquake upon Calvary, but all is still, careless,
uniform, regardless, in the winter night of Bethlehem.
Earth shows herself expressively inanimate, painfully so. It
is not the look of death, for that is full of mute disclosures.
It is like a fair face, with the mind gone from within. It is
below the eyeless beauty of the sculptured marble, a kind of
stolid beauty, making the heart heavy that looks upon it.
To me there is something quite awful in the silent drifting
of the stars over Bethlehem that night.

But let us turn from earth's fair material landscapes, and
from its dismal spiritual scenery, to the sights and occupa-
tions of heaven in that momentous night. At the moment
of the Incarnation had the angels seen anything in the Vision,
anything which was almost like a change 1 Had they seen
the Sacred Humanity lying in the lap of the Holy Trinity 1
Now on the night of this twenty-fourth of December was
there any visible movement in God? Was there any stir
upon the broad ocean of His adorable tranquillity 1 Did the
shadow of the Babe rest on His sea of silent fire 1 How
deeply must they have seen into God to behold that the
Incarnation was in truth no change, but that, like all God's
external works, it flowed naturally, so to speak, from His
perfections, and was in fact the original, exemplary model-
work of all God's outward works I How intensely beautify-
ing must the science be, which accompanies such a Vision as
this ! All eternity is one present point to God.

But, in our way of thinking, if He could have had memory,
how would He have pondered then the old silence before
creation, and this night's fulfilment of visible creation eter-
nally predestined I If there could be successive thoughts in

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 119

the great God, how adorably wonderful would have been the
thoughts of the divine mind at that midnight hour ! Such
must have been the sight which the angels, the eldest-born
of time, must have seen that night It would appear to
them as a beautiful procession, a procession of the Divine
Decrees, seeming to climb their successive heights, and shine,
like risen suns, upon the angelic spirits. It is these Decrees,
which men make the subject of so much controversy, but
which seem fitter matter for devotion, to whose sweet fires
they minister abundantly.

Controversy does but desecrate their silent sovereignty.
How the intelligences of the heavenly hosts must have
thrilled with magnificent worship and ecstatic delight, aa
they watched these eternal Decrees, slow, gigantic, venerable,
yet sweet-faced exceedingly, as though they had the counte-
nances of children, come up one after another out of the
abysses of God, and shine forth into their victorious accom-
plishment ! Each sun, as it rose over some immaterial
mountain-height discernible by the angels in the divine ocean
of essence, poured its golden effulgence into their vast spirits,
and filled them with throbbing tides of joy. Each sun flung
its grand dawn over them like a new world of light, each
seeming more beautiful than its predecessor, each indeed
appearing to exhaust all that was beautiful in God, until it
was presently outshone by another yet more incredible
grandeur, quietly and noiselessly streaming out of the pleni-
tude of God, as the speechless sun rises from the ocean.
Next to the Uncreated Procession of the Holy Ghost the
procession of those Divine Decrees, which represent creation
and its consequences, is the glorious pageant which makes
eternal festival for the blissful understandings of angels and
of men. One of the most dazzling of its sinuous bends was
passing before the raptured gaze of the angelic hierarchies,
on that night of the twenty-fourth of December.

I20 THE MIDNIGHT CA VE.

In all that assembly, in all the courts of highest heaven
that night, there was, except the shadow of the Babe, no
figure or form of man, no shape of human soul. The thou-
sands and tens of thousands of the redeemed saints were
waiting elsewhere, to be delivered only when the Babe had
died, and risen again, and to enter heaven only when He
first of all had triumphantly ascended thither. Surely we
may say with all reverence, that if God had been less than
God that night, His providence could not then have been
mindful of the countless details of His vast creation. Hia
own personal concurrence to every action, inward and out-
ward, rational and irrational, throughout the wide world
would have been unequal and irregular. Nature would have
fallen into the hands of its blind laws, like a child deserted
by its mother, and confusion and ruin would have ensued.
The equability of God's power and presence is most adorable,
and when we see it acting in its even, calm, unwithdrawn
extent even at the moment of such great mysteries as those
of Nazareth and Bethlehem, we get some faint idea of the
grandeur of His majesty, because, unworthy as even that
comparison may be, mysteries of such surpassing wonder
seem to be no more to Him, than the common actions, which
we are eliciting hourly with only a half-consciousness of
them, are to us.

As we read, and know not that we are actually spelling
while we read, so, from one point of view. Creation, Incar-
nation, and Grace seem to flow out of God without His
moving; while, from another point of view, we see Him
bending over a mystery like an intensely studious artist, or
over an individual soul, with all the anxious minute fondness
of a mother or a nurse. There was not a rude Briton in the
weald of Kent, nor a Gaulish Druid at his vigil on the sea-
ward-looking promontories, but God was assiduously attend-
ing to him that night, without an appearance of His attention

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. I2X

being distracted by other things. There were thousands of
villages, in hollows or on hills, upon which the quiet moon-
light was as softly falling, and calm Providence as noiselessly
busying itself, as at Bethlehem. The sleep, the food, the
health, the pulses of all the multitudinous beasts and birds
were being looked to in all places and at each moment by
our heavenly Father. He was dexterously saving animal life
among the grinding floes of the polar seas. He was measur-
ing the progress and weighing the falling out-thrust masses
of the glaciers amidst the reverberating mountains. He was
guiding with rudders of intervening love the lava streams of
southern volcanoes. He was intimately occupied with each
voiceless coral insect, that was laying the foundations of
new worlds, or crowning with rough diadem the craters of a
sunken world, in many an ocean far and wide. He was con-
curring in His omnipresence to a whole world of fantastic
dreams, that hovered on the wings of night over countless
sleepers, civilised or savage. Yet so tremendous was the
mystery of Bethlehem, that had He been less than God He
must have been caught and stayed by its excessive beauty,
and His complacency abstracted and absorbed in its ministra-
tions to His glory.

Let us descend beneath the earth, and see how that night
passed there, in the world of spirit which fills the planet, as
well as in that world which peoples its crust, and that which
encompasses its atmosphere. If we look into the limbus of
the fathers, there are surely silver flakes of light falling even
there. As there are degrees in sleep, and one sleep is sweeter
than another, so doubtless there were degrees in that repose
within Abraham's bosom. There might be more contentment
in their expectation, more sweetness in their conformity to
the will of God, more jubilee in their tranquil patient
love. Their life was as the lives of saints in ecstasy, and so
they waited. Their faith had become attainment, although

133 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

they had not yet attained; for it was turned into joy,
although it had not yet come to sight. There were pulses
doubtless in that realm of peaceful caves ; there was a heart,
and but one heart, in Abraham's bosom. There were times
when expectation trembled, and its tremulousness was an
increase of its joy. Adam and Eve were there, Abel and
Noe too, Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, Joseph also and
Daniel, Moses and Aaron and Josue and Samuel, the Christ-
like David, the good kings, the grand prophets, the brave
Machabees, Job and the multitude of the sanctified heathen,
and the penitents who had swum for life in the great deluge
and had found a better life through penance, even while
they lay in the lap of God's judgment. Perhaps there were
angelic visitations there that night to tell them the glad
tidings of Bethlehem, the village of the favourite Benjamin,
who thus had his peculiar joy that hour.

There was also the painless limbus of the children, souls
who had gone through no probation, and so had never stained
themselves with actual sin, and yet whom no sacrament had
brought into supernatural covenant with God. Perhaps in
their dimness there might be additional light that night,
something more like a shining in the pearly softness of their
perpetual dawn. There might be thrills in their unintelli-
gible beatitude, a quickening in the low-lying contentment
of their undeveloped lives.

Why do the fires of Purgatory all at once sink so low, and
why does the bitterness of their taste seem so diluted ? In
that realm it is a night of universal relief, perhaps also of
abundant release. Souls look at each other in astonishment
The release of the others is a joy even to those who remain ;
for it is an abode of consummate charity, although in ex-
quisite suffering. But now the Precious Blood is about to
appear upon the earth, where it can be shed, and in eight
days will be shed in fact That Blood is the cooling dew of

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB, 123

Purgatory. It fulfils an office there, which nothing but itself
can fill. For nine months a stream of divinest satisfactions
has flown out from the unborn Babe, and worked wonders
among those holy souls. The breath of those satisfactions
has passed over that sea of fire like a refreshing air, wafting
balm and coolness to the prisoners and exiles there. But
now these satisfactions are to find a wider outlet, and to flow
in a vaster channel, pouring their magnificent infinities orer
all creation ; and Purgatory is thronged with releasing angels,
waiting the midnight hour.

In that subterranean realm of spiritual suffering and
refining fire, St. Michael will display his exulting devotion
to the Babe of Bethlehem. 0 King Solomon ! art thou so
happy as to be there ? The true Solomon, the wise Prince
of peace is coming ; will He bring rest to thee, who wert the
chosen type both of His wisdom and His peace ? It is a
night in Purgatory, the very opposite of the night of the
slaying of Egypt's first-bom upon earth, a night truly to be
"much remembered before the Lord," but remembered for
that Grand Pardon, which has only been equalled and
surpassed by that other Pardon three-and-thirty years later,
when the Soul of the Babe left the Body upon Calvary.

Even in hell we must believe there was some stir. The
whole spiritual creation of God, even where it goes down
under the darkness in the inextricable eternal swamps, must
have felt such a mystery as the temporal Nativity of the
Incarnate Word, The mystery of hell is in close connection
with the mystery of Bethlehem. The latter recounts the
history, explains the significance, and justifies the difficulties
of the former. Doubtless there was an increased oppression
there, a nameless fear among the proud terrified spirits,
obstinate but horror-stricken, remorseful yet not repentantj
coveting God as the miser covets gold, and yet turning away
from Him with a scared loathing, and only worshipping Him

124 ^HE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

with the wicked worship of their curses. It is a world of
ruined grandeurs, a realm of blighted intelligences and
tortured lives, a multitudinous chaos which the vindicti\e
justice of the All-seeing and All-holy alone can disentangle
or understand, and yet which that justice has marvellously
sorted, named, and numbered. When the midnight struck
on earth, and was told by watchmen in its streets, there
must have run from the Cave of Bethlehem, swifter than
the vivid lightning, into the depths of hell a panic which
stunned the rebel hosts and made them cower. It would
increase perchance the hatred of the devils to the souls of
men, which now became exasperating monuments to them
of what they vainly try to think is a divine injustice. The
grand conspiracy of hell, the very malice of which had
something gorgeous about it, something which perhaps
horridly fascinated the guilty, is now baffled, baffled by the
quiet gentle might of the Incarnation, disclosed, frustrated,
put to scorn, by the speechless look of an Infant's eye in the
deep midnight at Bethlehem. He has come, whom His
Mother now addresses by that musical yet potent Name,
which had clashed all the bars and bolts of hell, a while ago,
when Gabriel first pronounced it.

But let us return to the Cave. If places are consecrated
in the eyes of whole generations by having been the birth-
places of great men, or the spots where they have produced
immortal works of genius, what shall we say of the spot
where the Incarnate Grod was bom ? Surely it must be a
place of pilgrimage to the end of time. They, who cannot
visit it in the body, must make their pilgrimage to it in
spirit. It is not merely devout curiosity which we shall
thus gratify, or even fresh fuel for the fires of meditation
which we shall lay up ; but, according to our usual way of
regarding things, we shall learn much about God, His char-
acter and His way, by our study of the Cave of Bethlehem.

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 13)

When we enter it, and attentively consider its furniture,
it seems to set before us the whole mystery of the Incarna-
tion. It lights up entire regions of the mind of God, and
discloses it to us with a mixed representation of symbols
and realitiea For what is it, which the red wind-shaken
lantern-light of St. Joseph reveals to us 1 The centre of the
Cave is as yet hidden from us. It is the Word made flesh,
the unborn Babe, around whom all the other things are
grouped. He is the centre of all worlds, and for the most
part invisible. His very creatures form a screen around
Him, as His Mother did at that moment Yet from time to
time He discloses Himself, as He will now do at midnight,
remaining this time obscurely visible for three-and- thirty
years. But even when hidden, He is still the attraction, the
unity, the life, the significance, the success, and the sublime
repose, of all the worlds of which He is the centre.

Round Him, as if it were the cloister of His sanctuary,
are the beauty and the strength of created holiness, guarding
His ineffable purity from the contact and the neighbourhood
of common creatures. In the midst of the cavern Mary is
at prayer. There was nothing commanding or persuasive at
first sight in her spiritual beauty. Many women in Beth-
lehem had seen her leave their doors that afternoon, and had
discerned nothing in her to rouse admiration, or even to
waken interest. They had known perhaps by some peculi-
arity of her dress, or by Joseph's accent, that she was from
Kazareth. They might have thought her young for so aged
a husband, and might have looked at her for a moment with
transient kindness, which the evidence of her being soon
about to be a mother would naturally excite. But this was
all. They dreamed not of her unspeakable dignity. They
perceived not the light of almost habitual ecstasy lurking in
her eye. No odour went from her, which environed them
with an atmosphere of heaven. There was nothing in

136 THE MIDNIGHT CA VE,

themselves, upon which the attractions of her awful holinesi
could act.

So is it always with the things of God. They do not
make their claims out loud. Their eloquence is their silence.
Their beauty is their mysterious unobtrusiveness. They do
not flash upon the eye, and so compel conviction. They
touch the heart, melt it, enlarge it, transform it, and, when
they have made it in some measure like themselves, they
enter into it and possess it. They require study. This is
their characteristic. Holiness is the science, by whose rules,
and in the light of whose discoveries, and by the delicacy of
whose processes, the study must be carried on. The nearer
a thing is to God, the more blinding is the light in which
it lies, and therefore the more assiduous and patient must
the study of it be. Hence it is that nothing requires so
much study as the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, and next to
Him, the chosen Mother of His Humanity. Very nigh
indeed to them comes the tranquil magnificence and unruffled
depths of Joseph's sanctity.

It is this then which occupies the centre of the Cave.
Uncreated Holiness and Created Holiness in One Person and
in Two Natures, the Incarnate Word, the Infant Creator,
there, but not yet visible, — this is the object of our wonder,
our love, our thanksgiving, our most absolute adoration. He
has around Him, almost blended in His beauty and His light,
two worlds of created holiness, vast and glorious, and both
of them without parallel In one of these worlds He has
dwelt Himself for nine months, and out of its material has
He vouchsafed to draw the materials of His own created
Body and Blood. The other of these worlds He has placed
near Him, just outside, and yet hardly outside, the actual
mystery of the Incarnation, as the outpost to defend Him,
as the satellite to minister to His Mother and Himself, as the
shadow under whose safeguard and concealment the mystery

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 127

might be operated in the way most suitable to the divine
perfections, as the shadow of the Eternal Father following
Him from heaven.

These three worlds form one system, which we name the
hierarchy of the Incarnation, in the stricter sense of the
words, or the nucleus of that hierarchy, if we speak less
strictly, although with perfect propriety ; and in this latter
case, the Apostles, the Baptist, the Evangelists, and others,
come into the system. Theologians have been bold enough
to name these three worlds of holiness the Earthly Trinity,
and the usage of the saints and of devotional writers has now
consecrated the reverently daring language. Thus is the
Cave of Bethlehem an awful image of the Threefold Majesty
in Heaven. It is there that the Divine Shadows are deepest,
and most clearly defined. It is there that all similitudes
between the Creator and the creature are drawn together and
concentrated. It is thus the very holiest core of creation,
the Creator Himself being there in a created nature. It
presents us with a kind of earthly beatific vision, in which
the unity, the distinctions, the relationships, and the pro-
cessions, of the Most High are marvellously pictured, filling
the beholder's soul with rapture, fear, and love. What are
the mysteries of music and of poetry, what the wonders of
the starry skies, what the stirring science of past creations
disinterred from the cyphered chambers of the taciturn rocks,
what the exciting pursuit of fugitive protean matter retreat-
ing, amid endless unexpected changes, into the fortresses of
its last elements, behind which the bafiled chemist with pro-
phetic genius ever suspects other last, and last resolutions,
and more and more ultimate refuges, to which he can at
present come no nigher, what the physiologist's intense and
joyous awe as with silent patience and his microscope he
tracks the principle of life amidst its labyrinthine cells, —
what are all these intellectual joys compared with the joy of

128 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

that mother-science, heaven-bom theology, which takes na
thus into the central sanctuaries of creation, and shows,
and illumines for us, the Earthly Trinity in the Cave of
Bethlehem t

Around that centre, what is the characteristic furniture oi
the Cave ! Who can doubt that all was there which was
most fitting, most divine, most in harmony with the incom-
parable mystery t Yet all is so unlike what we should have
imagined ! Five material objects stand round about, and, as
it were over the shoulder of each of them, we discern an
ethereal form looking on, a spiritual presence -assisting there,
of which these five material things are as it were the repre-
sentatives and symbols.

First of all there are the Beasts, the ox and the ass.
There is surely something inexpressibly touching in this
presence of the inferior animals at the nativity of the Incar-
nate Creator. In the Incarnation God has been pleased to
go to what look like the uttermost limits of His divine con-
descension. He has assumed a material, although a rational,
nature ; and, according to our understanding, it would not
have been seemly that He should have assumed an irrational
nature. Nevertheless He is not unmindful of the inferior
creatures. Their instincts are in some sort a communion with
Him, often apparently of a more direct character than reason
itself, and bordering on what would commonly be called the
supernatural.

At times there is something startling in the seeming
proximity of the animal kingdom to God. Moreover all the
inferior animals, with their families, shapes, colours, cries,
manners, and peculiarities, represent ideas in the divine
mind, and are partial disclosures of the beauty of God, like
the foliage of trees, the gleaming of metals, the play of light
in the clouds, the multifarious odours of wood and field, and
the manifold sound of waters. It was then, if we may use

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 129

such an expression, a propriety of divine art, that the inferior
creatures should be represented in the picture of their
Maker's temporal nativity. While the sheep lay on the
starlit slopes outside, the ox and the ass stood sentinels, full
of patient significance and dumb expression, at His manger.
The herds of cattle, which were collected within the walls
of Ninive, were one of God's reasons for sparing the repen-
tant city. The wild beasts in the wilderness were His com-
panions during His mysterious Lent ; and, as all beasts are
symbols of something beautiful and wise in God, so has He
many times vouchsafed in His revealed word to make them
the symbolical language, by which He has conveyed hidden
truths to men. They were not without their meaning in
the scene of the Nativity. They remind us that the Babo
of Bethlehem was the Creator. Their presence is another
of His condescensions. He is not only rejected of men, but
He trespasses, so to speak, on the hospitality of beasts. He
shares their home, and they are well content. They welcome
Him with unobtrusive submission, and do what little they
can to temper with their warm breath the rigour of the
winter night. H they make no show of reception, at least
they deny Him not the room He asks on His own earth.
They make way for Him, and there was more worship even
in that than Bethlehem would give Him.

We reckon such things as these among the humiliations
of our Blessed Lord, and rightly. Every circumstance,
every detail, every seeming accident of the Incarnation is full
of humiliation. It follows by a necessary consequence from
every mystery. Even the praise of men is a deep humilia-
tion to the Most High in His Incarnate form, when we con-
sider who they were that passed the favourable judgment
upon His actions, and with what mind, as if they had a right
lA) judge and patronise, they passed it, and also who He was
whom they were praising. All praise of God, unless it be

I

13© THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

worship also, is humiliating to Him. Thus everything about
the Incarnation was humiliating. Our Lord's Divinity as it
were holds a strong light over all His human actions and
sufferings, and shov/s each of them to us in its real char-
acter as an unfathomable abyss of condescension, no matter
whether the mysteries be those of glory or of suffering.
There are even some points of view from which the mysteries
of Tabor and the Risen Life seem to be more truly, and also
more unnecessarily, humiliations than the mysteries of Beth-
lehem or Calvary.

Nevertheless, after long meditation, together with an
habitual remembrance of our Blessed Lord's Divinity, there
are often times when we lose sight of this character of humi-
liation altogether. As the Divine Nature can suffer nothing,
so its adorable impassibility seems to pass in a certain way
to the Human Nature which was joined with it. Our Lord's
Divinity appears to hinder anything from becoming a humi-
liation. It raises ignominies into worshipful mysteries. It
clothes shame with a beauty which beams so brightly, that
it almost hides from us the horror of the outxage. His low-
ness becomes a divine height, a height which none could
reach but God. His disgraces are crowned with lustre, and
become nobilities. He raises what He touches to His own
height ; it does not sink Him to its vileness. There are men
who weep over our Lord's Passion, yet who have almost to
do a violence to themselves to realise His humiliations, so
strongly and so brightly is the grand thought of His Divinity
before their minds. Moreover it is just these men, who,
because they are so exclusively possessed with the idea of
His Godhead, honour with the tenderest minuteness and
with the most astonishing unforgetting detail the mysteries
of His Humanity.

Our Lord's companionship with the inferior animals was
one of these glorious humiliations, which have become

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE. 131

honourable mysteries. But He was not only their com-
panion. He was laid in their Manger as if He was their
food, the food of beasts, that so He might become in very
truth the food of sinners. This Manger was the second of
the material objects which were round about Him. While
it was a deep shame, it was also a sweet prophecy. It fore-
told the wonders of His altar. It was the type of His most
intimate and amazing communion with men. It was a
symbol of the incredible abundance and commonness of His
grace. It was a foreshadowing of His sacramental residence
with men from the Ascension to the Doom. It was like the
sort of box or crib we sometimes see at foundling hospitals,
into which the deserted child is put, with none to witness
the conflict of agony and love in her who leaves it there. It
is as if He were placed in the Manger like a fatherless
foundling, with the whole of the unkind world for His
hospital.

The rough Straw is the quilting of His crib; and the
refuse of an oriental threshing-floor is not like the carefully
husbanded straw of our own land. Men made Him as a
worm, and no man, in the onslaughts of His Passion. He
Himself in His first infancy makes His bed as though He
were a beast of burden, a beast tamed and domesticated for
the use of men. The vilest things in creation are good
enough for the Creator. He even exhibits a predilection for
them. The refuse of men, — that is the portion of God. It
is not only that we give it Him ; He chooses it : and His
choice teaches us strange things, and stamps its peculiar
character on Christian sanctity. Such is the furniture of
the nursery of the King of kings. The light of Joseph's
lantern shoots here and there redly and imperfectly through
the darkness, and we see the faces of the dumb Beasts, with
the pathetic meekness in their eyes, and tlie rough Manger
worn smooth and black and glistening, and the Straw

132 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

scattered here and there, and bruised beneath the feet of the
animals, and so perchance rendered less sharp and prickly as
a couch for the new-born Babe.

We must add to these features that very Darkness, which
the lantern so indistinctly illumines. The Darkness of
earth's night is the chosen, the favoured time of the Un-
created Splendour of heaven. It is the curtain of His con-
cealment, the veil of His tabernacle, the screen of His
sanctuary. He came first to Nazareth at dead of night. At
dead of night He is coming now at Bethlehem. At dead of
night also will He come, if we rightly penetrate His words,
to judge the world. There is no darkness with Him, and
He needs no light to work by, who called the sun itself from
nothing and hung it over with a white mantle of blinding
light. He came to darkness. It was His very mission. He
came when the darkness was deepest, as His grace comes so
often now. The very depth of our darkness is a kind of
compulsion to the immensity of His compassion. This
Darkness is the fourth material thing which is round about
them.

Lastly, we must note as another feature of the Cave its
excessive Cold. The very elements shall inflict suffering
upon their Creator as soon as He is born in His created form.
The air, which He must breathe in order to live, shall be as
inhospitable to Him as the householders of Bethlehem. The
winter's night will almost freeze the Precious Blood within
His veins. But what is the whole world but a polar sea, a
wilderness of savage ice with the arctic sunshine glinting o2
from it in unfertile brightness, a restless glacier creeping on-
wards with its huge talons, but whose progress is little better
than spiritual desolation ? The Sacred Heart of the Babe of
Bethlehem has come to be the vast central fire of the frozen
world. It is to break the bands of the long frost, to loosen
the bosom of the earth, and to cover it with fruits and

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 133

flowers. As He came to what was dark, so He came to
what was cold, and therefore Cold and Darkness were
amongst the first to welcome Him.

The Beasts, the Manger, the Straw, the Darkness, and
the Cold I Such were the preparations which God made for
Himself. From the first dawn of creation every step, and
there were countless of them, in the worlds both of spirit
and of matter, was a preparation for Jesus. It was a step
towards the Incarnation, which was at once the cause and the
model of it. While each step seemed to take creation further
on, it also brought it a step backward, a step homeward, a
step nearer to the original idea of it all in the mind of God.
The Creation of the angels was a step towards Jesus. The
successive epochs in which our planet was ripening for the
abode of man, and the successive forms of vegetation and of
life, which God caused to defile before Him in the slow order
characteristic of all His works, were all steps towards Jesus.
The patriarchs and the prophets, the history of the chosen
people which was a prophecy of the future at the same
moment that it was a free drama of the present, the uncon-
strained realised allegories of the lives of the typical saints,
the rise and fall of each system of Greek or Oriental philo-
sophy, the fortunes and destinies of the empires which thrust
each other from the stage of the world's history, all these
were steps to Jesus, all were the remote or proximate prepara-
tions for the Incarnation. When the Babe Mary was born
of Anne, the world little dreamed how God was quickening
His step. Mary and Joseph were the proximate preparations
for Nazareth, and for the midnight mystery of the unspeak-
able Incarnation. Each of these steps, as we study them,
tells us something more about God than we knew before.
The knowledge of Him grows into us through the contempla-
tion of them. But the grace of the Immaculate Conception
was like the opening of heaven. It seemed as if the next

134 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

moment men must see God ; and so it was, as momenta
count with God. Kow we have come to the proximate
preparations of Bethlehem, the Beasts, the Manger, the
Darkness, and the Cold.

But these things are spiritual types as well as material
realities. Matter has many times masked angels. There
were five spiritual presences in the Cave of Bethlehem, which
these five material things most aptly represented. There
were Poverty, Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy, and Morti-
fication. They started with the Infant Jesus from the Cave,
and they went with Him to the Tomb. They are stern
powers, and their visages unlovely, and their voices harsh,
and their company unwelcome to the natural man. But to
the eye, which grace has cleansed, they are beautiful exceed-
ingly, and their solemnity inviting, and their spells, like
those of earthly love, making the heart to burn, and full often
guiding life into a romance of sanctity. The companionship
of the Beasts, and the room they had as it were lent Him to
be born in, betokened His exceeding Poverty. The Manger
was the type of His Abandonment. Could any figure have
been more complete ? The refuse Straw, on which He lay,
and which perhaps Joseph gathered from under the feet of
the cattle, well expressed that Rejection, wherewith men
have visited and will visit Him and His Church through all
generations till the end.

The Darkness round Him was a symbol of those strange
and manifold Secrecies in which He loves to shroud Himself,
like the eclipse on Calvary, or the impenetrable thinness of
the sacramental veils. The wintry Cold, which caused His
delicate frame to shudder and to feel its first pain, was the
fitting commencement of that incessant penance and con-
tinuous Mortification which the All-holy and the Innocent
underwent for the redemption of the guilty. These five
things stood like spiritual presences around His crib, waiting

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 135

for His coming, Poverty, Abandonment, Rejection, Secrecy,
and Mortification. Alas ! we must be changed indeed before
such attendance shall be choice of ours ! Yet have they not
been evermore the five sisters of all the saints of God 1

There was something, therefore, in these five things, which
expressed the character of the Incarnate Word. They
pourtrayed His human sanctity. They were a prophecy of
the Three and-Thirty Years. They foreshowed the spirit
and genius of His Church in all ages. They reversed the
judgments of the world, and were the new standards accord-
ing to which the last Universal Judgment was to be measured.
They were in themselves a revelation ; for the ancient
Scriptures had but very dimly intimated them, and the
philosophy of the heathen had not so much as dreamed of
them. Even now, what are all heresies, which concern holy
living, but a dishonouring of themi Asceticism is part of
the ignominy of the Cross; and modem heathenism turns
from it with the same disdain, which the elder heathenism of
Greece and Rome showed for it in the days of the persecuting
Caesars.

Yet these five things not only contain the peculiar spirit
of the Incarnation, and embody its heavenly character-
istics, they also express the character of God Himself,
and throw light upon the hidden things of His divine
majesty. Is not created poverty the true dignity of Him
whose wealth is uncreated ? Shall He, whose life has been
eternal independence and self-sufficing beatitude, lean upon
creatures ? Can the very thought of comfort come nigh to
the Omnipotent, and not dishonour Him 1 Silver and gold,
diamonds and pearls, houses and lands, all these things surely
would have seemed more truly ignominies to God, than the
reproaches of Sion or the cruelties of Calvary. It was
enough that He let our nature lean upon His Person. It
was enough that He abased Himself to lean upon the sinless

136 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

beauty of His mortal Mother, and owe to her the possession
of that which He had Himself created.

Even the abandonment of Bethlehem was worthy of His
self-sufficing loneliness. Men fell off from Him, as if He
were not altogether of themselves, as truly He was not He
was used to stand alone. It was the habit of an unbeginning
eternity. It was the work of His own grace, the permission
of His own condescension, which allowed any one, even
Mary and Joseph, to remain with Him and be on His side.
There was something like worship in His abandonment
though they who abandoned Him meant it not as such. It
was an acknowledgment, blind, erring, even malicious, yet
still an acknowledgment of His unapproachable grandeur.
When men tacitly permit another's right to be alone and not
to mingle with the crowd, it is because their instincts divine
something in him which is entitled to the homage either of
their love or of their fear.

He was passive when men abandoned Him. When He
was active and offered Himself to them, they rejected Him.
Has not this been God's history with His creatures from the
first, independently of the Incarnation, if any passage in the
history of creation can be said to be independent of it?
Awful as is the guilt of this rejection, it glorifies God
unconsciously and beyond its own intention, even like the
despair of those who have chosen to hide themselves from
Him in everlasting exile. It is a mark by which we may
measure how far the finite falls off from the Infinite. It is
a token of the magnificent incomprehensibility of God. It
is the wickedness of ignorance which simply rejects God ; the
clear light of immortal despair defies, because it knows that
acceptance is now impossible.

The secrecy of Bethlehem is no less becoming to the
inscrutable majesty of God. He is invisible because created
eye cannot see Him. He shrouds Himself when He works,

THE MIDNIGHT CA VE. 137

lest creation should be blinded with the very reflection from
His laboratories. He needs to wear no other veil than Hia
own wondrous nature. The brightness of His uncreated
sanctity is a more impenetrable concealment than the dark-
ness of the old chaos. Secrecy alone becomes so great a
majesty, so resplendent a beauty, so unutterable a sanctity
as His. All revelation is on God's part a condescension. If
we may dare so to speak, it is rather love which humbles
Him to disclose His goodness, than glory which constrains
Him to manifest His greatness.

Last of all, mortification also is becoming to the majesty
of God. Even had He come not to suffer, but in a glorious,
blissful, impassible Incarnation, He would surely have moved
amidst the sensible delights and lovelinesses of earth as the
sunbeam moves through the wood, gilding trunk and leaf,
ferny dell and mossy bank, the stony falls of the brook and
the tapestry of wildflowers, the pageant of the bright insects
and the plumage of the shy birds, yet mingling not itself
with any of them, giving beauty, not taking it, colouring all
things, yet admitting no colour into its own translucent
whiteness, a heavenly yet an earthly thing, a loving light
upon us and amongst us, intimate, familiar, independent,
universal and yet unsullied.

It is by sensible things that we go deeper down into
creation, and confuse ourselves with its lower lives. Morti-
fication is the ministry of the senses to the God-seeing soul.
Immortification is the captivity of the soul to sing sweet
songs to the senses, and give an intellectual relish to their
enjoyments. Asceticism is simply an angelic life, grace
raising nature to a nature higher than itself, yea nigh, amaz-
ingly nigh to the very nature of God. There is a mortification
which is a fight for freedom. Such a mortification could in
no way belong to our Blessed Lord. There is also a morti-
fication, which is the full liberty of holiness ; and such was

138 THE MIDNIGHT CAVB.

His. It was not that lie did not assume our senses and the
sensible fashions of our lives, but that He bore Himself as
was becoming God towards those outward things. God
reveals Himself to us, as wishing, yet not constraining our
freedom so as to secure His desires ; as claiming rights, yet
contenting Himself with what is far below His claim; as
giving grace, and letting men make waste of its abundance ;
as pleading when it would have seemed more natural to
command ; as coveting the hearts of men, yet being unspeak-
ably less rich in His creature's love than He craves to be ;
as aiming at a mark, of which He is content to fall short ;
as compassing whole creations in His nets of love, and taking
but a partial prey. What is aU this but something of which
mortification is a created shadow ? Surely there is no truth
we need in these times to lay to heart more strongly, than
that the character of Jesus is the character of the invisible
God, and the fashions of the Incarnation the fashions also of
the Divine Incomprehensibility. What truth holds more
teaching that this 1 What teaching refutes at once a greater
number of untruths, and those too the special errors of our
day?

But why are we thus lingering so long on the threshold of
the great event ? Is it that the night draws on so slowly, or
that our desires are cold and unimpassioned 1 Love surely
knows full well of that impatience which delays, whose very
fire causes it to hesitate, to tremble, to grow calm. We are
looking on the sights which Mary's eyes beheld. It is some-
times said that she was so poor, that she was unable to make
better preparation for the coming of the Babe. By no means
let us think this. It could have been otherwise, had Mary
so chosen. If the Birth of her Beloved was to be in a stable,
and after the rejection of inhospitable Bethlehem, she could
have furnished other lining for the manger than the crisp
and prickly straw. She, who was prepared with the swad-

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 139

dling-clothes, might have been ready with better protecti«jn
against the cold of the rigorous night.

These accidents were not the necessities of the Mother's
poverty; they were the heroisms of her obedience. They
were the Son's choice, and the Mother knew well beforehand
what He had chosen. For nine months at least, if not before,
she had seen only with His eyes, and loved only with His
heart. She was in His confidence, and His tastes were her
tastes. His heavenly standards her weights and measures also.
Often in vision had she seen the Cave, and had been ravished
with the spiritual beauty of the unworldly preparations.
Now the hour was come, and she was looking on the realities.
They were a heavenly science to her, a most beautiful theo-
logy. She saw them not as we see them, merely on the
surface, as mirrors imaging divine things, but mistily and
brokenly. She saw deep into their wonderful significance.
Long processions of fair truths rose up and came out of each
of them. Their mysteries stood still, while she gazed upon
them. She beheld the accomplishment of their prophecies,
the strangeness of their proprieties, the gracefulness of their
unworldly lineaments. Light from heaven was round about
them, the radiance of the eternal splendours. They raised
her soul to God, and she entered into a blissful ecstasy, a
state which, if not natural to her, as some suppose, was at all
events ever nigh at hand, when she let her thoughts fly freely
to the centre of their rest.

Such was the unspeakable magnificence of her soul, that
we cannot doubt that the operations of grace within it during
that ecstasy were more numerous and manifold, as well as
incomparably more elevated, than those which fill a saint's
whole life, and call forth in us intelligent wonder, and
enthusiastic praise of God. Yet in her these operations were
also divinely simple, with an absorbing simplicity which no
saint has ever known. Her mighty soul strives to grow to

I40 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

the height and stature of the mystery, and falls far short oi
its incomprehensibility. It is a fresh joy, a rapturous re-
doublement of ecstasy, that it is in truth beyond her compre-
hension ; and more than ever she desires to look upon that
little Face, which shall express to her in its silentness those
mysteries which words cannot paint, and to the conception
of which busy thought can give neither hue nor form.
Evermore the Beasts, and the Manger, and the Straw, and
the Darkness, and the Cold seem to flit before her in her
ecstasy, uncertainly and double-faced, one while showing their
definite material features, and another while turning upon
her the beautiful countenances of Poverty, Abandonment,
Rejection, Secrecy, and Mortification.

She looked upward, and beheld those abysses in God,
which these outward things betokened. She looked inward,
with her new nine-months habit ; for that was to her what
upward was to all other adoring souls of men, and she
trembled at the greatness of the mystery ; she desired, even
while her humility feared lest a desire should be a will : but
the desire of her heart, like a shaft that cannot be recalled,
had sped its way. It reached the Heart of the Babe, and at
once she felt the touch of God, and was unutterably calm,
and Jesus lay on the ground on the skirt of her robe, and
she fell down before Him to adore. Twice had her pure
desire drawn Him from the home of His predilection, once
from the uncreated Bosom of the Father, and once from her
own created Bosom which He tenanted. It was as if the
sweet will of Mary were the time-piece of the divine decrees.

Mary has looked upon the Face of the Incarnate God. In
one glance she has read there voluminous wonders of heaven,
and yet sees that its loveliness is inexhaustible. The Vision
has surpassed all expectations, even such expectations as
hers. She gazes ; and, as she gazes, she can understand how
the mightiest spirits of angels and of men in the full grown

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. 141

fitature of their imperishable glory will unfold themselves in
the sunlight of that beautiful Countenance, and feed for ever
on the manifold expression of its sweet worshipful solemnity.
A change comes over her, of which this visible change is
the stupendous token. It is an unspeakable crisis in her
life of grace, one of those new beginnings, of which the
Annunication was one and the Descent of the Holy Ghost
another.

She was no longer the tabernacle of the hidden God. God
had changed His position towards her, and so her graces
were changed, changed with the only kind of change they
ever knew, an incredible augmentation. She was suddenly
clothed in a new purity ; for Jesus had again magnified her
spotlessness by the manner of His Nativity, as He had done
before by the manner of His Incarnation. It was a purity
such as no creature has ever shared. There had never been
heretofore a created purity which at all resembled hers. She
looks upon His Face, and grows more like Him by looking.
One while He wears an expression as if He were created,
another while as though He were that moment judging.
His great reason, with its plenitude of consciousness and its
abysmal science, was manifest ; and yet it overlaid not the
delicate gracefulness of infantine infirmity. There was
something in the silentness of His look, which compelled
worship by its palpable mysteriousness, even while it allured
familiarity by its almost pitiful and plaintive eloquence. As
at the moment of the Immaculate Conception, as in the hour
of the Annunciation, so was it at the Nativity. The Mother
began for the third time a new life of gigantic sanctities.

Joseph likewise draws near to adore. The earthly shadow
of the Eternal Father rests softly on the Child. His temporal
birth is complete in its adumbration of His unbeginning and
unending Nativity. Joseph draws near, that most hidden
of all God's saints, shrouded in the very clouds and shadows

142 THE MIDNIGHT CA VE.

which surround the Unbegotten Fountain of the Godhead.
His soul is an abyss of nameless graces, of graces deeper than
those from which ordinary virtues spring, roots which make
no trial of the winter of this world, but wait to bear mar-
vellous blossoms before the Face of God in the world to
come. We can give no name to the character of his sanctity.
We cannot compare him with any other of the saints of God.
As his office was unshared, so was his grace. It followed
the peculiarities of his office. It stood alone. He was to
Mary among men what Gabriel was to her among angels,
but he came nearer to her than Gabriel ; for he was of her
nature. What St. John was to Mary after Calvary, Joseph
was to her after Bethlehem ; so that probably, if we could
perceive it, there was an analogy between his holiness and
that of the Beloved Disciple.

But his sanctification is hidden in obscurity. It is prob-
able that he had received the gift of original justice, as the
Baptist had, though whether it was restored to him before
birth, as with John and Jeremias, we cannot tell. It is
oecoming to think also that by a special grace he was pre-
served from venial sin. It is most certain that he was a
peculiar vessel of the divine predilection, eternally predestined
to a singular and incomparably sublime office, and laden with
the most magnificent of graces to fit him for that office. For
wonderful as was his office to Mary, his office to Jesus far
surpassed it, unless, as is more true, the former was but a
portion of the latter.

He stood to Jesus visibly in the place of the Eternal
Father. He was loved therefore in a most peculiar way by
the Divine Person whom he thus awfully represented, and
also in a most peculiar way by the Second and Third Persona
of the Most Holy Trinity, because of that mysterious repre-
feentation. The Human Soul of Jesus must have regarded
him, not only with the tenderest love, but also with deep

THE MIDNIGHT CA VE. 143

reverence and an inexplicable submission. Meek and gentle,
blameless and loving, as St. Joseph was, it is not possible to
think of him without extreme awe, because of that shadow of
identity with the Eternal Father which belongs to him, and
hides him from our sight even while it presents him to our
faith. We cannot describe his holiness, because we have no
term of comparison. It was not only higher in degree than
that of the saints ; it was also different in kind. But it was
eminently hidden with God. His life was an unearthly life.
His very place in the world was but a seeming place. He
was an apparition in the world, an apparition of the Unbe-
gotten and Everlasting. His soul was as it were withdrawn
into itself. He was weak, and in years,* mild and unresent-

• In the controversy about St. Joseph's age, I must admit that the
majority of great names are on the side of his being in the prime of life,
between thirty and forty. This is the opinion of Gerson, Vigerius, Theophi-
lus Raynaudus, Eaaelius, Baronius, Suarez, Vasquez, Capisucchius, Serry,
Sandinus, Salianus, Tornielli, Toletanus, De Castro, Trombelli, Isidore
Isolanus, and Bernardino di Busto. The Apocryphal Gospels, St. Epi-
phanius, Cedrenus, Nicephorus, with antiquity generally, and especially
ancient pictures, represent St. Joseph as quite old. Gerson feels the
diflBculty of the ancient pictures, but says, in his usual and quite
characteristic way of referring to development in doctrine as the explana-
tion of everything, that painters did this purposely because the tenet of
the perpetual virginity of our Blessed Lady was not well rooted in the
minds of the ruder faithful. This reply is quoted with applause by
Kaffaello Maria the Carmelite in his very full book on St. Joseph. The
habit of contemplating St. Joseph as the shadow of the Eternal Father
has led me instinctively to take the side of antiquity in this dispute.
Without tradition, the text of Isaias Ixii. 5 is hardly convincing. The
opinion in favour of St. Joseph's youth makes him more than double our
Lady's age ; and this would make him seventy when he died, as traditions
about his death seem only to hesitate between a little while before our
Lord's baptism or a little while after it. The other opinion would add
from ten to twenty years to this. I may embrace this opportunity of
naming here some of the books most to be recommended on Devotion to
St. Joseph ; Istoria di San Giuseppe, by Raflfaello Maria, Carmelite ;
Synopsis Magnalium Divi Josephi, by Ignatius of St. Francis, also a
Carmelite ; St. Theresa's friend Father Gracian of St. Jerome, whose
Sj»anisn treatise has been recently translated into French ; Glorie di San
Giuseppe, by Don Giuseppe Loxada Becerra, written in St. Alphonso's
lifetime, and in imitation of the Glories of Mary ; Jacquinot's Gloirea de

144 '^HE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

ing, poor and obscure, passive and docile, and yet an inex-
pugnable fortress behind which the honour of Mary and the
life of Jesus were secure. If his hiddenness was like that
of God, so also was his tranquillity. His justice, like that of
God, was so tempered with mercy that it almost lost its look
of justice, and wore the semblance of indulgence. His holi-
ness was one of God's eternal ideas, one of those which He
most cherished, and kept nearest to Himself. He communi-
cated with God in his hours of sleep, as if his sleep was but
the mystic slumber of contemplation. Even now in the
Church he stands back under the shadow of the Old Testa-
ment, as if that were rather the dispensation of the Father,
and therefore the most congenial place for him.

He draws near to the new-born Jesus, that he may adore
before he commands. His vast soul fills silently with love,
and his life would have broken and ebbed away at the Infant's
feet upon the floor of the Cave, as it did years afterwards on
His lap, but the time was not come, and the Babe sanctified
him anew, and fortified him with amazing quiet strength
and robust gentleness, and raised him into a higher sphere
of holiness and of grace unspeakable, in order that he might
be the ofiicial superior of his God.

Who shall dare to guess what Jesus thought with His
human thoughts, as He lay there for a moment on the ground,
beholding with His eyes that furniture of the Cave which
Mary had been beholding, and which He had chosen from
all eternity 1 Who would essay to fathom the unfathomable
depths of that love and worship which He gave to God, a
finite worship but of value infinite ! The whole history of
creation, past, present, and to come, was before Him. He
saw it all, embraced it all, understood it all. He felt Him-
Sfc. Joseph, recently reprinted ; and Vita di San Giuseppe, by Antonia
Maria dalla Pergola, a Franciscan. The treatises of Gerson and the
Sermons of San Bernardino are, however, the fountains from which all
have drawn.

TUB MIDNIGHT CA VE.

US

self to be the centre round which all else revolved, the hinge
upon which all things turned, the light in which all was
plain, the dread lovely meeting point of the Creator and the
creature. He was busy worshipping, He was busy redeeming,
He was busy judging, at that moment.

All hearts of men lay in His Heart at that hour. We too
were there, centred in a little sphere of His loving knowledge
and His merciful consideration. We, too, were inmates of
the Cave of Bethlehem, and of the Cave's divinest centre,
the Heart of the new-born Babe. Is not that thought enough
to set the rudder of our life heavenward once for all ? Who
sliall tell the ineffable love which He bore to Mary, whom
He was then first looking on with His human eyes, and
whose fair soul lay open to His inward eye and pleased dis-
cernment? Who shall tell with what exulting reverence He
yearned towards Joseph ? For Mary and Joseph were both
radiantly wet all over with that Precious Blood, which, yet
unshed, was flowing in His veins, and throbbing in His
Heart. Those Three ! they were three kingdoms of God,
but one King ; three creations, and the Creator one of these
creations ; three, yet as it were but one, one with an amazing
unity, a unity which made them one, yet left them three,
the Earthly Trinity !

From the Earthly Trinity the adoring soul looks up abashed
to the Most Holy Trinity on high, thus wonderfully forth-
shadowed on the earth. Prostrate before the Incompre-
hensible Majesty the hierarchies of the angels were bowed
down at the hour of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Through
all the illimitable depths of the Godhead, profoundest oceans
of unfathomable being opening out everywhere into like
profoundest oceans, through all the immeasurable realms of
Essence which space girdles not, over all the outstretched,
uusuccessive Life which time recounts not, was there an
immense Complacency, an unutterably tranquil, brooding

K

146 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB.

glory, at the moment when the Babe was born in Bethlehem.
There were immaterial waves of divine exultation, the very
spray of which might have been the star-dust of countless,
countless worlds, which passed at that hour, over the abysses
of the divine mind, over the radiant, far-withdrawn furnaces
of the divine life. Yet was there no change in the Immut-
able. There was no stir in God.

Gathered up, as from the beginning, whole and entire and
full, into each possible point of space and time, that divine
life abode in its stationary calm, just as it had been, from
before the beginning, when there were neither space nor
time. There was no sound. Creation would have perished
if that divine gladness had sounded. At the voice of such
thunder nature must have fled away. There was no move-
ment : all things must have been displaced had God moved.
They would have dropped back into indefinable nothingness
from before any gesture of God's simplicity. The Infinite
encroached not on the finite with the bounding of that un-
utterable joy. Its presence broke not the slightest vessel
which it filled, nor tore the frail rose-leaf within whose
countless arteries it can confine itself by its - essence and its
power. Not a thrill was felt through the delicate framework
of nature, which one sunbeam of the daybreak can cause to
tremble, to vibrate, and to glow. Vast, colossal, resistless,
unbounded, incomprehensible, was the Divine Complacency ;
yet the hush of midnight was not stiller, the breath of sleep-
ing babe was not so gentle.

There was no change in the Unchangeable. Yet to angelic
eyes the Father seemed, not more a Father, yet in a new
way a Father, as He bent over the Babe in the Cave of
Bethlehem. Not unmarked surely in the Person of the Son
was His sweet condescending joy in that Sacred Humanity,
now among the visible things of a glad earth which already
Bp teemed with loveliness. Surely with more than common

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB, 147

predilection the invisible lightnings of the Holy Ghost played
round Bethlehem, and the joy of Mary was but an emanation
from the joy of her Uncreated Spouse. They saw, those
bright angelic hosts, they saw with trembling adoration, and
the sight gladdened their endless gladness, and made their
glory glow more wondrously, the Complacency of the Most
Holy Trinity in the new-born Child, as it were a new jubilee
in the Immutable, a new Father because the Eternal Father
was newly a Father, a new Son because the Everlasting Son
was now also a Son in time, a new Holy Ghost, because He
was from old the Unbeginning Jubilee both of Father and
of Son, and now the jubilee was new, new without novelty,
new without mutation, new with an eternal newness. It
was as if creation were making ripples on the shining,
glancing depths of the Uncreated, while the Word was being
still and again begotten and begotten of the Father, begotten
eternally at the self-same moment He was being born in
time, begotten eternally the moment after He had been bom
in time, and while the jubilant Spirit was still and again
proceeding and proceeding, eternally proceeding from the
Father and the Son in the selfsame moment that Jesus was
being born in Bethlehem, and still, and not anew, proceeding
and proceeding the moment after that Birth in Bethlehem.

Thus it was, with such strange divine triumph, that the
Creator came forth to be as it were a part of His own visible
creation. But how did His creation receive Him 1 What
welcome did it give Him 1 What response did it make to
the mystery of Bethlehem 1 A response altogether worthy
of Him it could not be ; for that was impossible, nay, beyond
all possible power with which omnipotence itself could endow
creation. But it welcomed Him as it best could, and it was
very gloriously. Mary's first act of worship met Him the
very moment He was born. No sooner had she seen His
Face than she adored Him more perfectly than all the angels

148 THE MIDNIGHT CA VB,

nad been able to do in their thousands of years before the
throne. Except by the Incarnate Word Himself, never had
the Divine Majesty been worshipped so worthily, so near to
adequately, if we can speak of nearness when we think of
that gulf which lies between the finite and the infinite.
Never creature so cowered down before God in the sense of
its own exceeding nothingness as Mary did. She could stoop
lower than any one else, because she was so much higher in
holiness.

Joseph also had worshipped Him as no saint before had
done. From his deep calm soul he had poured out a very
ocean of love, tenderest love, humblest love, love shrinking
from being like the Father's love, yet also daring to be like
it, as Mary's had been like the conjoined loves of Father and
of Spirit, as she was Mother and Spouse conjoined. No
angel might love Jesus as Joseph loved Him, as Joseph was
bound to love Him. No temporal love but Mary's could be
more like an eternal love, than the love of Joseph for the
Child, because of its likeness to the love of the Everlasting
Father. The choirs of angels also sang out loud in the mid-
night heavens, while the winter night ran over with the
sweetness of their strains. Every note in their music, every
pulse in their exulting song, represented a whole world of
supernatural acts in their mighty spirits, acts of love, of
complacency, of worship, of adoring gratulation, of self-
oblivious jubilee. Never had creation been so wonderful as
it was that night, never had it gathered round its God so
gloriously as it did then ! Never did it look less imperfect
than when at that still hour it strove to lift itself to the
height of the grand mystery, and, while it fell short infinitely,
yet it fell short worthily ! Who would have dreamed that
finite worship could be so nearly infinite as it was tliat night 1
0 joyous thought, 0 grateful remembrance, that Jesua was
thus welcomed into the world !

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE. 149

But we must try to enter further into this thought. Oui
view of the mystery of Bethlehem is incomplete without it.
Fresh light is thrown on the Creator's coming by creation's
response to His coming, its welcome, its salutation, its recog-
nition of Him. The true history of His triumph is not told,
if the applauses which greeted Him are not mentioned also.
The scene of the Creator's installation in His own creation is
imperfect, unless we depict also creation doing its homage,
and swearing its oath of fealty before His throne and at His
human feet. Now Mary is not only the sovereign creature,
but she is the representative creature also. While therefore
the worship of Joseph and the songs of the angelic hosts are
magnificent incidents in the coming of our Lord, we may
consider Mary's first act of worship as by itself substantially
the welcome of creation to its Creator ; and even at the risk
of a little recapitulation we must consider it attentively.

The most difiicult fact for us to apprehend rightly about
our Lord's Three and-Thirty Years' life is the amount of it
which was lived to God, to God only, to God secretly, with-
out any apparent connection with the great work of redemp-
tion, or without any visible benefits there and then to the
welfare of mankind. Next to God, Mary seems to usurp an
unexpected amount of His time, presence, and divine com-
munications, yet with how legitimate a usurpation ! As
it is the tendency of our modem mind in science, rightly
rebuked by the geological discoveries of the secular epochs
of our planet untenanted by man, to make ourselves the
centre of God's works, and to look out only for adaptations,
ministries, and subserviences to ourselves in all the glorious
kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and mineral magnificence, so
are we apt in theology too much to regard our Lord as com-
ing to do one two-sided work, first to teach us lessons of
heavenly wisdom, and then to suffer and die for our redemp-
tion.

150 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

We almost picture Him to ourselves, more or less uncon-
Bciously, as a modern man of active habits, engrossed with
His work, losing no time about it, bending all things to it,
and, if not precipitate about it, at least diligent, exclusive,
and decisive. In the light of this modem view we construe
His words to Mary in the Temple, forgetting the eighteen
years of apparently inactive seclusion, which as a matter of
fact followed the utterance of those words; and again we
put a like construction on His seemingly impatient speech
about His Passion, not discerning those supernatural prin-
ciples of love of souls and thirst for suffering and appetite
for shame, which our Lord's example has impressed for ever
upon Christian holiness. It seems to us strange that our
Lord's human life should be of any use to God, except as
the instrument of our own redemption. The idea of worship
is faint and feeble in our minds. Work, utility, success,
palpable results, — these are what we look for. Hence we
neither habitually see how inexplicable on our principles our
Lord's division of His life into thirty years of seclusion and
three of active work really is, nor discern the divine signifi-
cance of it when it is pointed out to us. We thus do an
injustice to His secret created life of adoration before God,
and almost ignore His wonderful exclusive occupation with
Mary, which absorbed so much of the time He spent on
earth. This causes us to misread the Gospels, to arrange
the mysteries of our Lord in wrong order and with bad
lights upon them, and to miss in many of the mysteries that
which is most specially divine about them.

In their measure these remarks apply also to the mysteries
of Mary, and to the place which they occupy in the life of
our Blessed Lord. The things of God have an air and odour
about them unlike the things of the world. Like the fra-
grance of the woodlands, we are conscious of the sweetness,
but do not trace it to the mossy bank, or to the withering

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE. 151

herbs, or to the dew-bathed flowers, from which it comes.
We may even see the things of God, and not know them
when we see them. They seldom bear their divinity on
their outward appearance. It is not stamped upon them,
but hidden in them. However much we have prepared our-
selves for their secrecy, they are in the experience more secret
than we were prepared for. Hence it comes to pass that
divine things almost always take us unawares.

There is also a noiselessness about them which brings
them upon us, when we are least suspecting their neighbour-
hood or dreaming of their approach, while at the same time
they are so swift that they have come and gone without our
having had time to pause upon them. We only know from
the breathlessness of our souls, that we have suffered some
divine thing. They pass upon us not as growths of earth.
They only float over it, like the clouds that dapple the moon,
never anchoring their shadows there, but always passing,
though sometimes with an imperceptible slowness. They
seem even to be regardless of their influence upon earth.
They look as if they did not intend to influence it, or as if
their influence were a bye-play, a consequence of their pre-
sence which they could not avoid but which they did not
value, an accident, inseparable from them certainly, yet still
an accident, about which they were not anxious and on
which they laid no stress. It is as if they had derived some
of His self-sufficiency from the God who is their author.
Their value, and they are conscious of it, is not their having
done a work on earth, but their abiding life and beauty with
God for ever. The individual soul is world enough for
them ; for they only want a kneeling- place on which to put
themselves before the majesty of God and in the sunlight of
His glory. When they have reflected back upon His mag-
nificence one of His own rays, their mission is accomplished,
but their work passes not away. That reflected light of

152 THE MIDNIGHT CAVB.

iheiia lies over the vast awfulness of God, and is beautiful
there, for ever.

So was it with Mary's first worship in the Cave. The
light of it is lying upon God this hour. A century of church-
history is a less event in the chronicles of the Incarnation,
than that act of Mary. The supernatural value of our
actions depends upon our degree of union with God at the
time we do them. But what spirit of angel or soul of man
was ever in such union with God as the soul of His blessed
and sinless Mother? Neither had there yet ever been
a moment in which she had been so closely united to God,
as at the moment of our Saviour's birth. The moment of
the Immaculate Conception was indeed a marvellous epoch
in the world of grace, momentary in lapse of time, secular
in the immensity and durableness of the work. The moment
of the Incarnation had been yet more wonderful Who can
say how wonderful ? But her union with God had grown
inconceivably during His nine months' residence within her
bosom. How could it be otherwise 1

Thus at the moment of the Nativity, she was more closely
united to God than she had ever been before ; for union was
the especial distinguishing grace of those nine months ; and
she was united to Him with a union compared to which the
most glorious mystical unions of the saints are but as shadows
and as semblances. Her ecstasy at midnight was as it were
a fresh spiritual rivet to that union. When she saw the
Child born, lying on her veil, with hands stretched out to
her as if mutely asking to be taken up, He asking, the
orphan God, for the embrace of a mortal mother's arms, and
when she saw the beauty of His Face, and felt it passing
into her soul, was she not immersed in God as never creature
Had been before ? Her first act was an act of love, but it
was the highest love, the love of adoration. Although she
had languished to see the Human Face of our Blessed Lord,

THE MIDNIGHT CA VE. 153

yet uow that she gazed upon it, it was His Divinity she saw,
rather than His Humanity. To her His Human Nature
unveiled, rather than veiled. His Godhead. She saw in
Him, and worshipped especially, the Person of the "Word,
the Second Person of the Undivided Trinity. As none had
ever been so near to God, so none had ever worshipped Him
so well. The angels, who had been lying for ages in the
blaze of the uncovered Vision, saw not so far as Mary, though
they saw differently, and while they worshipped with all the
capacities of their grand natures, they worshipped not so
wonderfully as she worshipped ; for they were in shallower
depths of divine union and of transforming love, than was
she, the Mother of the Most High.

She as it were encompassed our Lord with her ecstatic wor-
ship. All He was and is and has she covered with her praise,
her wonder, her fear, her joy, her love, her jubilee. She, who
had more than miraculously compassed Him in her bosom,
went as near to compassing Him with the immensity of her
worship, as it was possible for mere creature adequately to
compass His illimitable and uncreated glory. His Divine
Person, His Divine Nature, His Human Nature, with His
Soul as well as His Flesh, the passable state in which He
had vouchsafed to come because of sin, all these she wor-
shipped, mindfully and tenderly, separately and together,
with clearest intelligence, with deepest abasement, with
sweetest love, with most awe-stricken admiration. All His
perfections as God came before her in wonderful order, en-
chained together, flowing out of each other and back into
each other, each looking both backward and forward at once.
She saw them also as one perfection, as the divine simplicity,
and then she saw them as no perfections at all, but as His
simple Self, a Self with no perfections but the Act which
He Himself is, a Self with no separable attributes, but only
an eternal life which is ever living in Itself, too simple for

154 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

thought, too beautiful for speech, too magnificent for loveij
too jubilant for fear, only to be rapturously adored, with a
timidity which transcends all fear, and with a familiarity
which far outgrows all audacities of love.

In adoring the divine perfections of the new-born Babe, we
may well believe that Mary worshipped particularly those
attributes seemingly most opposed to His infant state. The
instincts of prayer would lead her that way. The very cir-
cumstances of the mystery would suggest it. She adored
profoundly the eternity of Him who was but a minute old.
She congratulated Him in the boldness of holy love on His
having been from everlasting co-eternal with the Father, and
at the same time eternally a Son. She exulted in the know-
ledge that from all eternity her Babe had with the Father
breathed forth the Holy Ghost, and had been with the Father
the principle from which the co-eternal Spirit had proceeded,
and was for ever proceeding, and was to proceed for all eter-
nity. It was a joy to her that time, old as it was, was a
younger birth than Him whose birth in time was one short
minute since. She was abased with sweetest reverence when
she looked into His childish Face, and with delighted faith
hailed Him as time's Creator.

She looked upon Him in His weakness and His helpless-
ness. His beauty was so frail that it seemed as if a breath
of summer wind might have blown Him away. It was as if
He could not lift Himself from the ground on which He was
lying, or raise Himself into His Mother's arms. Yet in that
weakness she adored His almighty power. She worshipped
Him as the unfatigued Creator, who had built up the massive
worlds with an act of His will, who held the mountains in
the hollow of his Hand without the effort of sustaining them,
and who directed the earthquakes and the storms, as pliant
and docile creatures, where He pleased. She exulted in the
boundless majesty of His tremendous power. She congratu-

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE, 155

lated Him that at that moment all creation hung upon Him
with its whole weight, and that, were He to loosen His hold
of it for an instant, it would fall back into that nothingness
from which it came and to which through its, own finite
imbecility it is ever tending. She felt and joyed to feel,
that she herself was but as the breath of His mouth, and that
she too was relapsing into nothingness, unless He held her
up by the irresistible gentleness of His vast power. She
worfchipped Him as the God to whom nothing is impossible,
and yet whose power works with such facility, such smooth-
ness, and such delicacy, that it makes no sound in its going,
feels no effort in its magnificence, and strives not in its career.
He upheld all things even while He slept, and yet His
features were sweetly relaxed in the graceful abandonment
of infantine slumber, and upon His countenance there was no
sign of care, nor strain of labour, no shadow of government,
nor semblance of occupation.

She beheld Him speechless on the ground. Only perhaps
an inarticulate cry was rising from His childish lips. But
she worshipped Him as the articulate Word of the Father,
pronounced from all eternity, and even now being eternally
pronounced, with most inexplicable articulation. He, who
expressed, not to creation only, but to the Father Himself,
the whole of His marvellous perfections, He who with
unutterable distinctness outspoke the whole mystery of the
Godhead, He who pronounced in the language of His co-equal
beauty all the hidden things of the Divine Nature, He it was
who was lying speechless on the ground ; and Mary adored
Him in His truth, not in His seeming. He wore the same
look of unconsciousness which other infants wear. His life
looked the animal life of infantine wants and woes and little
jubilees, to be expressed by bright eyes, or by sounds which
are language only to a mother's ear. But in this apparent
unconsciousness she not only recognised the mighty reason

156 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

in full possession of itself, but she also adored that immense
and uncreated wisdom, which is in some sense the favourite
attribute of the Word. She exulted in the thought that
there was no wisdom among angels or men which was not
simply a derivation from His wisdom, and that there were
no philosophies or sciences which were not the merest scin-
tillations of His uncreated knowledge. All the impenetrable
secrets of creation were out of the hidden treasures of His
wisdom. The marvellous plans of nature, grace, and glory,
countless in number, bewildering in variety, incalculable in
their profundity, were all but as the merest surface of His
ever-blessed mind. The intricacies of providence, those dark
and seemingly contradictory problems which have often driven
to wildness or despair the irreverent questioning and profane
inquisition of the human understanding, were all calmly
evolved by His skill in lucid beauty and admirable sequence.
The very unconsciousness of the Babe held a light over all
this abyss, and Mary looked down, and saw, and worshipped.
Thus also to the Mother's eye His littleness magnified His
immensity. He seemed all the more illimitable, because Ho
was so small. He lay upon her veil a mere span of fair
human life ; but she knew that in truth He was outstretched
beyond all possible spheres of imaginary space. She adored
the omnipresence of that tiny prisoner, whom a delicate frame
of flesh and blood was now containing. For nine months
she herself had compassed the Incomprehensible, and now
she saw as it were with her bodily eyes the immensity which
had lain so long like an unopened flower in her own virginal
bosom. She rejoiced with Him in His universal presence,
in His immeasurable essence, in His unconfined liberty, in
His inexplicable unlocalised simplicity. She congratulated
Him that all about Him was boundless, not only putting
away from itself all the limits of imaginable perfection, but
far transcending in its own awful truthfulness, not only all

THE MIDNIGHT CAVE, 157

actual existence, but all possible existence. The possibilities
of omnipotence far outstrip the flight of created imagination,
but to equal the immensity of God is impossible even for
God Himself.

Finally, when Mary beheld Him trembling with the cold,
and discerned the pathetic sadness which mingled with the
brightness, and perhaps saw Him weeping human tears, she
worshipped Him whose eternal life was an unspeakable
beatitude. She recognised in Him the uncreated fountain of
all created joy. She knew that at that instant He was filling
to the brim myriads and myriads of angelic spirits with
celestial exultation. She knew that there was not a joy on
earth among men or animals, but it was a sparkle mercifully
struck from His abounding and self-sufficing gladness. Nay,
when our lives, and the lives of those we love, are dense
with sorrows, there is a joy even in the sorrow, like the fra-
grant damps of the close dripping woods of midsummer, and
that joy is but the sweet bliss of God, compassionately mak-
ing its way even thither. Thus it was, that, while Mary
worshipped Jesus with the most perfect worship of which a
mere creature is capable, she especially adored those perfections
which to outward seeming were least compatible with His
infant state.

She beheld also how His Human Nature lay in Hypostatic
Union with His Divine, and therefore was itself entitled to
the honours of divine worship. Hence she worshipped the
spiritual beauty of His Sacred Humanity. She worshipped
the Flesh, which He had taken from herself, and in which
He was to suffer, and by His suffering to redeem the world.
She worshipped it as the real Sacramental Food of all the
generations to come, to be adored by all the faithful upon
the altar. She adored it also as impassible and glorious, gifts
which it already contained within itself. She adored with
the most delighted reverence the Precious Blood which was

158 THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

flowing in His veins. She exulted in the abundance and
even prodigality of the redemption which the munificent
shedding of that Blood was to accomplish. She congratu-
lated Him on the countless victories of grace which it would
procure for Him, the marvellous holiness of the saints, and
the magnificent conversions of sinners, and the glorious
perseverance of all who should die in union with Him. She
saw that Precious Blood in its course over the world as a
broad and brimming river, carrying fertility into every land,
flushing the face of nature with the verdure of grace, causing
the wilderness to blossom as the garden, and the barren rocks
to be covered with shadowy woods, redolent of odours, golden
with fruits, and resonant with songs. She beheld on its
broad bosom huge fleets freighted with heavenly treasures
sail onward to the eternal sea. She admired the silent,
irresistible beneficence of its sweet streams, and adored it in
the veins of the Child, and wept tears of humblest joy as
she thought of its fountains in her own Immaculate Heart.

She worshipped His Sacred Heart with all its sanctified
affections. She saw His immense love of herself therein, and
penetrated the wonders of which that love was full, and how
gloriously the human and divine were blended in it, and
were one unequalled, unprecedented love. She beheld also
the place which each of us occupied at that moment in His
all-embracing Heart ; and surely it would seem to her that
there was nothing about Him more adorable than His inexpli-
cable love of sinners. More wonderful is that love than even
the all-wise means by which He emancipated sinners from
their sin. She adored His Soul with all its marvellous
operations, and its depths of wisdom and of joy. Nothing
was omitted in that act of worship. Everything found its
place. Everything came in its right order. To everything
its due honour was paid, so far at least as a mere creature
could pay what was due to God. Such was Mary's first act

THE MIDNIGHT CAVB, 159

ii worship, an act of which we shall be able to conceive more
worthily, when we have considered in subsequent Chapters
the Babe's perfections as God, and the eminences and excel-
lences of His Soul and Body as Man, considerations which
we have been here obliged in some measure to anticipate.
But these are things which bear repetition weU.

Now let us reflect on all that was involved in this act of
adoration. As was said before, Mary is not only the sove-
reign creature ; she is the representative creature also. Thus
her worship was ofiered in the name of all creatures. It was
creation's recognition of its Incarnate Creator. Moreover
she began in it, and as it were officially inaugurated, all the
manifold catholic devotions to the Sacred Humanity, such as
those to the Sacred Heart, to the Precious Blood, to the
Blessed Sacrament, to the Infancy, to the Passion, and the
like. She not only began them, anticipating the loving
inventions of the saints, but she surpassed all that the saints
have ever done in eacli. That act of worship is a life in the
Church at this present hour, passing daily into holy hearts,
guiding the sense of the faithful, supplying fair types of
various devotions, and queening it with tranquil pre-eminence
over all other collective homages of redeemed love to the
Sacred Humanity of the Redeemer. Her worship also, let
it be observed, was not disjoined from the worship of St.
Joseph, with whom she was in the closest spiritual union, as
God had united them in the transcending unity of the Earthly
Trinity. ' His worship and hers had one prerogative, which
the worship of none else could have ; for they offered to Jesus
with it the authority they were to exercise over Him. From
Joseph, as from Mary, our Blessed Lord received the worship
of those whom He Himself had constituted His superiors.
If the bent of the hearts of the saints is a token of the bent
of Mary's heart, and is itself the instinctive inspiration of
tlie Heart of Jesus, then in these latter days it would seem

i6o THE MIDNIGHT CAVE.

that by nothing could we po effectually unite ourselves to the
Hearts of Jesus and of Mary, as by a loving and reverent
devotion to St. Joseph.

Moreover in this act of worship our Blessed Lady recog-
nised us as her children. She was conscious of the place
she occupied in the creation of God. She began already to
fulfil that office, with the insignia of which she was publicly
invested upon Calvary. She offered herself to the new-born
Babe for us. She was willing to be our Mother. She was
ready to endure for us those dolours with which she was to
travail with us her second-born, so unlike the painless child-
birth of that night. She was prepared to represent us in all her
tender ministries to Him. She offered us also to Jesus. She
offered us to His love. She freighted her prayers with our
names. She yearned for our more and more complete con-
version, and longed that we might be part of the happy
triumph of His Passion. By her effectual intercession she
bathed us in His Precious Blood, and was forward to accept
that active and prominent place, which she occupies in the
secret life of grace with every one of us. For us also she
offered Jesus to the Father. With heroic love she gave back
for our sakes what for her own much more than for ours she
had just received. She saw that Calvary was in the offering
and yet she drew not back her uplifted hands. Such was
her beautiful three-fold oblation. She offered herself to Jesus
for us. She offered us to Jesus. She offered Jesus to the
Father for us. Then from the height of Calvary she turned
round and faced the Church of all coming ages, and offered
to us all our Blessed Lord for our acceptance and our love.
So she climbed from the Cave to the Eternal Father, from
the offering of herself to Jesus to the offering of Jesus to the
Father. For, if the first thought of the Mother is for the
Child, is not the second for its Father ?

Thus was completed the mystery of Bethlehem. Thus

THE MIDNIGHT CA VB. i6i

were we present there in our Mother's hands and in our
Saviour's Heart. It has taken long to tell ; yet it was but
for a moment that Jesus lay upon the ground. In a moment
all these things had been accomplished. The tyranny of
time sits lightly on divine works. They have other measures.
The infinite must needs be instantaneous. 0 happy Mother,
happy beyond all thought ! she has seen the Face of Jesus,
and He smiled into her face. Was it through tears 1 What
significance was there not in that celestial human smile ? He
smiled as a Son smiles to a doating mother. He smiled as
the victorious Saviour who had redeemed her by the Imma-
culate Conception. He smiled as the Creator who com-
placently regards the most lovely of His works. He smiled
as the Last End and Beatitude of her whom He rejoiced to
glorify and to have with Him for eternity. He smiled as
God, smiling unutterable and unimaginable things. Of a
surety there was some special expression in that first look,
in that many-meaning smile, which reminded her of the
Immaculate Conception as distinctly as if He had spoken,
Nor was the joy of that smile less to her than its significance.
But she alone can tell it. It makes us tremble with expecta-
tion to think that that same smile will one day be a joy to
us, and a joy which will not pass away ! But, like all the
aspects of God, that smile brought with it a world of grace.
It was substantial, as God's visitations ever are, substantially.
effecting that which it expressed. How therefore must it
have lifted her in sanctity, and been to her almost like a new
creation ! A look of His converted Peter ; what must a
smile do, and a smile into His sinless Mother's face? O
sweet Babe of Bethlehem ! when shall we too kneel before
Thy Face t When shall we see Thee smile, smile on us our
welcome into heaven, smile on us with that smile which will
sit upon Thy lips as our own glory and possession for ever-
more 1

L

I63 THE MIDNIGHT CA VE.

Listen ! the last strip of cloud has floated down under the
horizon. The stars burn brightly in the cold air. The
night-wind, sighing over the pastoral slopes, falls suddenly,
floats by, and carries its murmuring train out of hearing.
The heaven of the angels opens for one glad moment, and
the midnight skies are overflowed with melody, so beautiful
that it ravishes the hearts of those who hear, and yet so
soft that it troubles not the light slumbers of the rostl^G
sheep.

C 163 )

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

Long centuries have come and gone. The world has plunged
forward through many revolutions. Almost all things
are changed. There has been more change than men could
have dreamed of. It seems incredible, even as a matter
of history. The actual past has been more wonderful than
any sybilline oracle would have dared to depict the future.
History is more fantastic than prophecy. Time moves,
but eternity stands still ; and thus amidst perpetual change
the faith, which is the representative of eternity on earth,
remains, and is at rest ; and its unchangeableness is our
repose.

The Bethlehem of that night, of those forty days, has
never passed away. It lives a real life ; not the straggling
Christian village, on which the Mussulman yoke seems to
sit so lightly, on its stony ridge ; but the old Bethlehem of
that momentous hour, when the Incarnate God lay on the
ground amid the Cattle in the Cave. It lives, not only in
the memory of faith, but in faith's actual realities as well.
It lives a real, unbroken, unsuspended life, not in history
only, or in art, or in poetry, or even in the energetic fertile
worship and fleshly hearts of the faithful, but in the wor-
shipful reality of the Blessed Sacrament. Round the taber-
nacle, which is our abiding Bethlehem, goes on the same
world of beautiful devotion which surrounded the new-

I64 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

bom Babe, real, out of real hearts, and realised by God's
acceptance.

But independently of this august reality, Bethlehem exists
as a living power in its continual production of supernatural
things in the souls of men. It is for ever alluring them from
sin. It is for ever guiding them to perfection. It is for
ever impressing peculiar characteristics on the holiness of
different persons. It is a divine type, and is moulding souls
upon itself all day long, and its works remain, and adorn
the eternal home of God. A supernatural act of love from
a soul in the feeblest state of grace is a grander thing than
the discovery of a continent or the influence of a glorious
literature. Yet Bethlehem is eliciting tens of thousands of
such acts of love each day from the souls of men.

It is a perpetual fountain of invisible miracles. It is
better than a legion of angels in itself, always hard at work
for God, and magnificently successful. Its sphere of influence
is the whole wide world, the regions where Christmas falls
in the heart of summer, as well as in these lands of ours. It
whispers over the sea, and hearts on shipboard are respond-
ing to it. It is everywhere in dense cities, where loathsome
wickedness is festering in the haunts of hopeless poverty,
keeping itself clean there as the sunbeams of heaven- It
vibrates up deep mountain glens, which the foot of priest
rarely treads, and down in damp mines, where death is
always proximate and sacraments remote. It soothes the
aching heart of the poor pontiff on his throne of heroic
suffering and generous self-sacrifice ; and it cradles to rest
the sick child, who, though it cannot read as yet, has a
picture of starry Bethlehem in its heart, which its mother's
words have painted there. Bethlehem is daily a light in a
thousand dark places, beautifying what is harsh, sanctifying
what is lowly, making heavenly the affections which are
most of earth. It is all this, because it is an inexhaustible

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 165

depth of devotion supplying countless souls of men with
stores of divine love, of endless variety, and yet all of them
of most exquisite loveliness. This then is what we are to
consider in the present Chapter, Bethlehem as a sea of devo-
tion, an expanse of supernatural holiness, a wide field of
sanctities, which are a great part of the daily life of the
Church of God.

The mysteries of the Incarnation are a sort of disclosure
to us of the infinity of God. They reveal Him hy the very
manner in which they compress His immensity. When we
come to consider any one of these mysteries hy itself, we are
continually heing astonished by the number of phases under
which it presents itself to us. It seems to diversify itself
endlessly, to pass from one light to another, like the hues of
the prism, or to enter into an inexhaustible series of combina-
tions, momentarily changing, like the play of gold and colour
in the sunset. The difi'erent circumstances of life, bright or
dark, overshadow or illumine the mystery, and reveal to us
depths in it, which we had never suspected, and beauties
which we had hitherto omitted to observe. Sorrow and joy
are both of them instruments of the soul ; and both of them
are at once telescopes and microscopes. With our growth
in grace the changes of the mystery are yet more remarkable.
It puts on something more than fresh significance ; it is like
a new revelation. Who has not felt how every Holy Week
brings the Passion to him new, astonishing, and untasted 1
The odour and the savour of the mystery change, as it com-
bines with our changed and augmented grace. No Christmas
is like its predecessor. Bethlehem grows more enchanting.
The strain of the angels is sweeter. We know more of Mary
and of Joseph. The Child surpasses Himself year after year.
Moreover the significances of our Lord's mysteries are not
mere theological allegories ; much less are they poetical in-
terpretations. They mean all that they can mean. They

i66 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

mean the same to all men, and yet different things to each
man. They unfold fresh meanings to fresh generations.
The ages of the world comment differently upon them, and
there is always new matter for each new commentary. This
comes from the unutterable prolific truthfulness of God. No
one has ever fathomed yet the least mystery of the Three-
and-Thirty Years. Angelic spirits are hanging over the
abyss deep down, like sea-birds over the dizzy cliff, and far
below them, because of such sublimer wing, the soul of Mary
floats softly, and wafts herself over depths to which they
dare not descend ; and yet even she has not fathomed yet
the fair mysteries to which she ministered.

If we think of the different ways in which our loving fear
could approach the Cave of Bethlehem, we shall find on re-
flection perhaps that there are nine spirits of devotion which
take possession of our souls. There are nine attitudes in
which our hearts will naturally put themselves before the
Babe. The genius of the Sanctuary seems nine-fold. It is
not easy to express these nine loves, these nine worships, in
words : f ^r not only does one follow hard upon another,
but they borrow from each other, pass off into each other,
return upon each other, reflect or anticipate each other, blend,
intermingle, and melt into one, after such a marvellous and
characteristically divine fashion, that it is impossible to
define them. To pourtray them is as much as we can
do. Now, when we come to the historical Bethlehem, we
find as a matter-of-fact that the first worshippers there may
be said to be nine in number, a coincidence which seems
to raise our ninefold division of the devotion to the Sacred
Infancy to something more than a devotional conjecture.
As there were nine choirs of angels round the throne of
the Eternal Word in heaven, so were there, in type and
semblance at least, nine choirs of worshippers round the
Incarnate Word in Bethlehem. Nine choirs of angels sang

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 167

In heaven, nine kinds of worshippers silently adored on
earth.

Yet we must not forget, that amidst all this variety there
is at the same time a complete and higher unity. All devo-
tions to the Sacred Infancy have one spirit in them, however
diversified they may be. It is a spirit by which they are
distinguished from devotions to the Passion, or to the Hidden
Life, or to the Public Life, or to the Risen Life. Spiritual
writers may differ as to the definition or description of this
spirit. They may not agree in what it consists. They may
hold conflicting opinions as to the peculiar graces which this
spirit forms.* But there is no simple lover of Jesus, who
does not as it were with an undelaying and unerring instinct
discern the spirit of these devotions to the Sacred Infancy,
and see how one is like to another in some essential property,
while they are all different among themselves in other respects,
and different also in that particular spirit from other devo-
tions to the Incarnation. Then again in another way they

* When this was written I did not posseaa, as I do now, the bulky
quarto on the Infancy of Jesus by Father Joseph Parisot, of the French
Oratory (1665), It is extremely prolix, as all the books of the disciplet
of the Venerable Berulle seem to have been, and, as was their fashion
also, the facts are drowned in perfect inundations of tiresome moral
reflections. Nevertheless it is a complete repertory of the history, spirit,
and hagiology of the Devotion to the Sacred Infancy. Ordinary readers
will find enough in Patrignani's abridgment of the long and also long-
winded French life of Margaret of Beaune. M. Bray of Paris has
published a remarkably pleasing life of her by M. de Cissey, which is of
course to be procured without any diflSculty. M. Bray is also the
publisher of the Manuel de I'Archiconfr^rie de la Sainte Enfance, and
likewise of the Ame a I'Ecole de Jesus Enfant. One of the volumes of
Patrignani has also been translated into French under the title of Le
Livre de la Sainte Enfance (Avignon. Seguin Ain6 1857). It contain!
the examples from the lives of the saints. The life of Mother Mary of
the Holy Trinity, novice-mistress to Margaret of Beaune, and, even more,
the Life of Elizabeth of the Holy Trinity, in the third volume of the
Chroniques des Carmelites Fran^aises, are full of wonderful things both
about Sister Margaret and the devotion which she propagated in th«
Church.

i68 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

all belong to a still higher unity. There are points in which
devotions to the Sacred Infancy touch upon devotions to the
Passion, and indeed identify themselves with them. The
same may be said of devotions connected with the other
divisions of our Lord's life. These junctions, or points of
union, indicate the unity of all devotions to the Sacred
Humanity, and the oneness of spirit which pervades them
all It is sometimes wonderful to see the results which
grace produces in the soul by means of the congenialities of
seemingly opposite devotions, and how an old grace lives on
in a new vocation, feeding on something in a fresh devotion
which has an affinity to devotions that have now been
changed for others, and superseded by them. Thus, while
we speak of the diversity of devotions to the Sacred Infancy,
we must keep steadily before us that they are a family of
kindred devotions with the same spiritual blood in them,
and that they have this separate unity of their own distinct
from that higher unity to which they all belong as devotions
to the Sacred Humanity.

The special devotion to the Childhood of Jesus, which
has distinguislied the later Church, was a growth of the
Carmelite Order, in whose blooming wilderness it was
planted by the Holy Ghost at Beaune in France. The Vener-
able Margaret of Beaune was the instrument whom He
raised up to propagate this devotion, not only by her teach-
ing but by her mystical life and states of prayer, which were
a sort of dramatic representation of the mysteries of the
Sacred Infancy. Many older saints, such as St. Antony of
Padua and St. Cajetan, had been distinguished by a like
special devotion. But it was systematised in the hands of the
French Carmelites, and took a more tangible and exclusive
shape than it had ever done before. We have thus received
it from one of the grandest congregations of the grandest
order in the Church, and the order which belongs to our

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 169

Blessed Lady by a more ancient and especial right than any
other. The present devotion to the Sacred Infancy is as
much the gift of the Carmelites, as the present devotion
to the Sacred Heart is the gift of the lowly sweet-spirited
daughters of the Visitation, But it is remarkable how
seldom, if ever, the works of God spring from one fountain.
There were many persons in France, contemporaries of Mar-
garet of Beaune, who had at the same time been led by the
impulses of the Holy Ghost to a special devotion to the
Sacred Infancy. Among these the well-known De Renty
should have the highest place, although he was not singular
in his devotion. It is said of him by his biographer that
" he existed in the grace of the Infancy of Jesus as a sponge
exists in the sea, only that he was incomparably more lost
and confounded in the exhaustless ocean of the infinite
riches of that Divine Infancy, than a sponge is in the waters
of the sea." While some have made purity, and others
innocence, and others simplicity, the distinguishing spirit of
all these devotions, it seems as if De Renty, and others of
his time, considered the acting in all things according to a
pure movement of grace, as the special spirit of the Sacred
Infancy. An attentive study of the lives of those saintly
persons, whom the Holy Ghost has formed on these devo-
tions, seems to bear out this conclusion. But at any rate
the unity of these devotions is undeniable, as is also their
power to form a character of very peculiar and cognisable
sanctity proper to themselves. At the same time their
attraction is less universal than that of the Passion, and is
seldom disjoined from it.

Before we proceed to examine the nine types of devotion,
with which the Cave of Bethlehem will furnish us, we must
remind ourselves of the difference between devotions to the
Sacred Humanity, and those to angels and saints, or even to
the mysteries of our Blessed Lady, which are so inextricably

I70 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

blended with the mysteries of our Lord, that they maj
almost be said to be one phase, and that a universal one,
of all His mysteries. Mary is present almost everywhere,
and her shadow falls on pictures where she is not represented
on the canvas. "Well as we know this difference between
devotions to the Sacred Humanity and those to angels,
saints, or even our Blessed Lady, we should never spare
ourselves the admonition of it, because of its surpassing im-
portance, especially as securing that doctrinal accuracy which
should distinguish all devotions to the Sacred Humanity,
and which, by keeping our Lord's Divinity before us every
instant, deepens our devotion, and encompasses it with that
breathless reverence which is the very life of heavenly love.
"We must bear in mind, then, throughout, that devotions
to the Sacred Humanity involve nothing less than divine
worship. We pay to the Sacred Heart or the Precious
Blood of our Blessed Lord precisely the same adoration as
to the Most Holy Trinity, because His Divinity communi-
cates to them its own worth by virtue of the Hypostatic
Union. Although His Two Natures are uncommingled and
unconfused, so that His Divine Nature receives no admix-
ture, and His Human Nature loses none of its genuineness,
and although His Two Wills, Human and Divine, are quite
distinct, nevertheless His Two Natures are united in One
Person, and that Person is divine. The union of the Two
Natures takes place, not by the blending of the Two, but in
the unity of the Person ; and this is what is meant by the
term Hypostatic Union. This confers an infinite value and
dignity on the operations of His Human Nature, and entitles
each drop of Blood, and indeed whatsoever belongs to the
integrity of His Human Nature, so long as it remains in the
Hypostatic Union, to the honours of divine worship. Almost
all the objections, which unthinking persons sometimes urge
against particular devotions to the Sacred Humanity, or

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 171

against the forms which those devotions take, arise from a
forgetfulness of this fundamental doctrine of the faith. All
such devotions imply habits of mental prayer, and mental
prayer is a school in which even the simplest learn much
theology. Perhaps no one, who had a real habit of mental
prayer, was ever found among the objectors to the devotion
to the Sacred Heart ; but without this habit such objections
are most intelligible, because of the way in which the
dogmas of the faith can remain undeveloped, and their in-
ferences unsuspected, in those who, not being theologians by
education, have not become such by prayer.

Yet, while adoration in the strictest sense of the word
enters into, and gives an august solemnity to all our devo-
tions to the Sacred Humanity, they are nevertheless tempered
with a familiarity unlike the worship of the divine perfec-
tions. It is not that they are more tender ; for the tenderest
and most tearful of all worships is that of the inscrutable
grandeurs of the Most Holy Trinity. No devotion can equal
that for melting the heart, and filling it full of the most
childlike happiness and softness. But there is a certain
boldness of approach, a certain freedom of human language,
a certain deeply reverential familiarity, yet still a familiarity,
which distinguishes devotions to the Sacred Humanity. AVe
have a distinct picture of the object of our worship in our
minds, which affects both our language and our feeling.
Our Lord's assumption of our nature is a peculiar approach
to us, to which we on our side have to correspond, and we
correspond by this familiarity. Thus the familiarity becomes
itself part of our reverence for the incarnation, an element
in oVii worship of it. A devotion, which rests upon created
images and historical facts, must have a character of its
own.

Even the worship of the Unseen God, when it is pleading
past mercies and reposing on the remembrance of old com-

172 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS,

passions, imbibes a kind of familiarity without any detriment
to its reverence, as we may see by comparing the worship
of Job with that of the patriarch Jacob. The latter speaks
and entreats almost as man with man, whereas the former
cowers before the whirlwind of the divine majesty, while
the boldness of his expostulations is wrung from him by the
very agony of his fear. Devotions to the Sacred Humanity
are a kind of divine worship, of which neither angels nor
men could ever have dreamed without revelation, but which
have been invented by God Himself, and contain in them-
selves the spirit and significance of that mystery of the In-
carnation, which was the cause, and type, and rule of all
creation. They form a liturgy of divine composition, a
missal and a breviary of the divine ideas, such as would be
unimaginable by any mere created intelligence. What the
Lord's Prayer is as a form of words, these devotions are aa
the attitude of adoring minds ; and from their divine
authorship they have a sacramental power and a privileged
acceptance.

They are therefore of an entirely different nature from
devotions to the angels or the saints. In common with
those devotions they have an intercessory character, only of
a far more efficacious and irresistible kind ; while at the
same time they approach God directly by divine worship.
They unite all the excellences of other devotions, only in an
unspeakably supereminent degree, with the awfulness of
perfect adoration, and have also a peculiarity of their own
derived from the grand mystery of the Incarnation, out of
which they flow. They are necessary also to a worship
which is mystically higher and more perfect than themselves.
As our Lord's Sacred Humanity is our way to God, so in
ordinary cases these devotions are the way of the soul to the
contemplation of the Divine Attributes and of the secrets of
the Undivided Trinity. Devotions to the Sacred Humanity

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 173

can never be dispensed with. They will not allow them-
selves even to be depreciated in comparison with what are
technically higher contemplations. They do not form a
stage in the spiritual life, which we ultimately transcend.
They are not merely an ascent to a table-land on a higher
level, from which we may look back upon them. They are
indispensable from the first They are indispensable to the
last A disesteem of them, if it is intellectual, is heresy ;
if it is practical, is delusion. These devotions also have a
peculiarly substantial effect upon our spiritual character, and
mould our spiritual life with an irresistible pacific force,
which belongs only to themselves, and which distinguishes
their action in the work of our sanctification. There are
many reasons for this, many which we cannot explain,
although we divine them, and are sensible of their presence.
But the chief reason is the amount of the living spirit of
Jesus which they both contain and communicate, contain in
an inexhaustible measure, and communicate according to the
degree of our purity and fervour : and all holiness is but a
transformation of us into the substantial likeness of our
Lord.

Our Blessed Lady presents us with the first type of devo-
tion to the Sacred Infancy. We have already seen how in
her worship of the Child she represented all creation, and
immeasurably surpassed it. Her worship was in many re-
spects a different kind from what ours can be, independently
of its exceeding in degree even the worship of the saints.
She herself occupied a singular position in God's creation,
which as it were spheres her apart from all other creatures.
Her height is not only unattainable by any other ; it is also
unapproachable. She belongs to the hierarchy of the Incar-
nation, and has what may be called rights over our Blessed
Lord, which are sufficient of themselves to give a distinct
character to her worship of Him. In all this therefore she

174 T^HB FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

was admirable rather than imitable, and it is not of such
things that we are now going to speak.

She is an example as well as a wonder ; and it is hei
pattern which we are at present to put before ourselves.
Our possibilities of holiness are greater than we like to sup-
pose. We estimate them below the truth, because it is pain-
ful to our selflove to contemplate such a gulf as really exists
between what we actually attain and what we might attain.
For the same reason we underestimate the amount of grace
which we receive, in order that we may not have to force
upon our own notice the difference between the height which
is practicable to us through correspondence to grace positively
conferred upon us, and the lowness of our real state in the
spiritual life. A detailed correspondence to grace in things
quite within our compass would lead us almost unawares to
heights of sanctity, which nature trembles to contemplate
when it beholds them in their full abrupt altitude, and not
as a gradual ascent. If a man saw in one collective vision
all the bodily pain and mental suff'ering which would succes-
sively accumulate upon him during his whole life, he would
perhaps be driven to despair, or at least a shadow would lie
over his spirit which would blacken all that was bright
around him. In like manner men shrink from the pursuit
of perfection, when they realise the amount of self-crucifixion
which will have taken place by the time the proposed height
is gained. Thus it frightens us to think of Jesus and Mary
as our examples.

In our Lord's case we take refuge in His Divinity, and
narrow unwarrantably the sphere of His human action. In
our Lady's case we magnify her exceptional greatness, and
think we do her virtues homage by putting them beyond
the reach of our imitation. Even with the saints our
cowardice loves to exaggerate the admirable at the expense
of the imitable. Alas ! if we would but let each day's grace

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 175

lead lis whither it wills with its gentle step, its kind allure-
ment, and its easy sacrifice, in what a sweetly incredible
nearness to the world of saints should we not find ourselves
before many years were gone ! It was correspondence to
grace, which was Mary's grandest grace. It is her correspond-
ence to grace which interprets and accounts for her immense
holiness. It was her correspondence to grace which made
her sanctity congruous to her unparalleled exaltation. If we
will be but as faithful to our little graces as she was to her
great ones, we shall at last draw near to her, or what we may
call near, by following her example in this one respect.

The distinguishing characteristic of her worship of Jesus
was its humility. Those who are raised on high have a lower
depth to which they can stoop, than those whom grace has
simply lifted out of the abyss and left almost on its brink.
But, independently of this, great sanctity seems to have a
power of humiliation, which is the result of all its combined
graces, and not of any one of them in particular. For both
these reasons Mary's humility has no parallel among the
saints. It distantly approaches to that unutterable self-
abasement, which belongs to our Blessed Lord Himself, that
grace to which He clung, and in the Blessed Sacrament still
clings, with such an adorable predilection. It was through
her humility that Mary received her various sanctifications.
Indeed it was through her humility that she became the
Mother of God. The love of that grace fixed the eye of the
"Word, the eye of His eternal choice upon her. He looked
upon the lowliness of His handmaid. We speak of great
graces raising us up on high ; but our language would ex-
press more truth if we spoke rather of their sinking us deep
in God. To sink in our own nothingness, provided we love
while we are sinking, is to sink deep in God. When we
sink out of sight in Him, not only out of sight of the world,
"but also, and much more, out of sight of self, then is qui

176 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

life really hidden in God, and hidden there with Christ,
because His Sacred Humanity dwells so deep in God by
virtue of its marvellous abasement. Thus we cannot doubt
that, at the moment when our Lady received the grace of
the Immaculate Conception, she humbled herself before
God in a manner which one of the saints even would hardly
understand.

By this act of humility she at once established a kind of
proportion between her merits and the magnitude of the
grace she had received. It was the allurement of her beauti-
ful humility, which caused the Word to anticipate the time
of His Incarnation. At the moment of the Incarnation she
was clothed afresh with an indescribable humility. In the
creature humility is the infallible accompaniment of nearness
to the Creator. It is the only created thing which enables
creatures to live in the atmosphere which is immediately
around the Throne. When therefore the august majesty of
the Eternal lay awfully furled within her bosom, the humility
which possessed her whole soul must plainly have been
beyond our conceptions of that heavenly grace. But, as all
her graces were ever growing, and as for nine long months
there was the same abiding reason for this unspeakable self-
abasement, to what a depth in God must not her humility
have reached by that midnight hour in Bethlehem 1 Yet,
when she beheld her own Son, her new-born Babe, lying on
the ground, and remembered that He was truly none other
than the everlasting God, and the very Son of her own sub-
stance, the flower which had blossomed of her own virginal
blood, she must at once have sunk into fresh and nameless
depths of holiest abjection. No creature ever made an
offering to the Eternal Father from lower depths than Mary,
when she offered Jesus to Him at the moment of His birth,
except Jesus when He offered Himself to His Father at that
selfsame moment, blending His oblation with His Mother's j

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 177

and He found unshared depths of self-anninilation which
He could not have reached, had He heen less than God.

This, then, is the first example which Mary gives us, an
example whose importance and significance are greatly in-
creased when we regard it in connection with devotion to
the Sacred Humanity. It is only by an intense spirit of
adoration that the heavenly virtues of these devotions are
extracted and distilled in our souls.

The first fruit of humility is joy. The grace, which we
find in the depths to which we sink, is spiritual buoyancy ;
and our lightness of spirit is in proportion to the profound-
ness of our abasement. A mother's joy over her firstborn
has passed into a proverb. But no creature has ever rejoiced
as Mary did. No joy was ever so deep, so holy, so beautiful
as hers. It was the joy of possessing God in a way in which
none had possessed Him heretofore, a way which was the
grandest work of His wisdom and His power, the greatest
height of His inexplicable love of creatures. It was the joy
of presenting to God what was equal to Himself, and so
covering His divine majesty with a coextensive worship. It
was the joy of being able by that ofifering to impetrate for
her fellow-creatures wonderful graces, which were new both
in their abundance, their efficacy, and their excellence. It
was the joy of the beauty of Jesus, of the ravishing sweetness
of His Countenance, of the glorious mystery of every look
and touch of Him, of the thrilling privileges of her maternal
love, and of the contagion of His unspeakable joy, which
passed from His soul into hers.

The whole world, by right of its creation, by right of
having been created by a God so illimitably and adorably
good and bright and loving, is a world of joy. Joy is so com-
pletely its nature that it can hardly help itself. It blossoms
into joy without knowing what it is doing. It breaks out
into mirthful songs, like a heedless child whose heart is too

178 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

full of gaiety for thought It has not a line or form about
it, which is not beautiful. It leaps up to the sunshine, and
when it opens itself, it opens in vernal greenness, in summer
flowers, in autumnal fruits, and then rests again for its winter
rest, like a happy cradled infant, under its snowy coverlid
adorned with fairy-like crystals, while the pageantry of the
gorgeous storms only makes music round its unbroken
slumber. Mary, the cause of all our joy, was herself a
growth of earth, a specimen of what an unfallen world would
have been ; and it was on an earthly stem that Jesus Himself,
the joy of all joys, blossomed and gave forth His fragrance.
Thus nature and life tend to joy at all hours. Joy is their
legitimate development, their proper perfection, in fact the
very law of living; for the bare act of living is itself an
inestimable joy. Nothing glorifies God so much as joy.
See how the perfume lingers in the withered flower : it is
the angel of joy who cannot take heart to wing his flight
back from earth to heaven, even when his task is done.

It is self which has marred this joy. It is the worship
of self, the perpetual remembrance of self, the making self a
centre, which has weighed the world down in its jubilee, and
almost overballasted it with sadness. It is humility above
all other things which weakens or snaps asunder the hold-
fasts of selfishness. A lowly spirit is of necessity an unselfish
one. Humility is a perpetual presence of God; and how
can self be otherwise than forgotten there 1 A humble man
is a joyous man. He is in the world, like a child, who
claims no rights, and questions not the rights of God, but
simply lives and expands in the sunshine round about him.
The little one does not even claim the right to be happy ;
happiness comes to him as a fact, or rather as a gracious law,
and he is happy without knowing of his happiness, which is
the truest happiness of all So is it with him whom humility
has sanctified. Moreover, as joy was the original intent of

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 179

creation, it must be an essential element in all worship of
the Creator. Nay is it not almost a definition of grace, the
rejoicing in what is sad to fallen nature, because of the
Creator's will t Thus Mary's devotion to the Babe of Beth-
lehem was one of transcending joy. There is no worship
where there is no joy. For worship is something more than
either the fear of God, or the love of Him. It is delight
in Him.

With Mary's joy, if not out of it, came also a fresh increase
of her unutterable purity, a grace whose perfection is the
complete loss of self in God. There is something in purity,
which is akin to infinity. It implies a detachment from
creatures, an emancipation from all ignoble, even though
sinless ties, which sets us free to wing our flight to God,
and to nestle in Him alone. All attachment to creatures
narrows our capacity for holding God. There are many
earthly loves which ennoble us ; but they do so by saving us
from lower things, not by leading us to higher. When the
competition is between earthly love and divine, it is the last
^rhich sufi'ers, because it is its nature to possess hearts, and
not to share them. Multitudes of men often come to love
God by loving men. It belongs to the saints to have a love
of men, which is nothing else than a portion of their love ot
God.

Mary could love her Child with all the passionate fond-
ness of an heroic mother; for her fondness was literally
worship also. The excess of human love, which we name
idolatry in others, in her was simply adoration. The mystery
of our Lord's Nativity was in itself a mystery of purity. It
was a new miracle adorning her virginity. It would there-
fore of itself immensely increase her purity, and render it yet
more sublime. But her heavenly joy brought with it also
an augmentation of this loveliest of graces. Purity is the
proper gift of joyous spirits. Its home is in the sunshine

l8o THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

and its voice an endless song. Even while clouds and light
are struggling for the mastery on earth, purity turns faith
into sight ; for the pure in heart wait not for heaven. They
see God now, and they see Him everywhere ; and as joy
hrought purity, so purity brings fresh joy ; for what is the
sight of God but jubilee t

From our Blessed Lady's purity came her deep simplicity.
This is a grace which belongs to the regions near God. In
our close valleys we know but little of it. It is the soul's
highest imitation of the Divine Nature. It betokens already
that great victory of grace, when oblivion of self no longer
requires an effort, but has become like a second nature.
Mary did not reflect upon herself. She did not refine with
the fiubtilties of her lofty science on the mystery before her.
She blended the earthly and divine in her one act of worship,
with something like the simplicity with which they were
blended in the union of the Incarnation. Her worship
sought for nothing. It rested in its object, and was content.
It was not aware of itself. It took no count of things. It
had lost itself in God-
Yet this simplicity, whose life is in self-oblivion, how
thoughtful does it make us of others, of multitudes of others,
di no less a multitude than all the dwellers upon earth !
Mary gives away her joy as soon as she has got it. She
gives Him away for us. In the very heaven of Bethlehem
she consents to the horrors of Calvary. Her first devotion
to the Sacred Infancy ends in devotion to the Passion.
"What else but a spirit of oblation could come of such unsel
fishness 1 How many lessons are there for us in all this !
How beautifully can the devotion, that is for ever unselfing
itself, perfect itself in all its various degrees by copying
Mary at the feet of her new-born Babe 1 It is a venturous
humility, and yet after all a true humility, which dares to
take no less a pattern for its worship than that of God's own

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. i8i

Mother, who worshipped for all God's creatures with a
worship to which their united worship, endlessly prolonged,
never can come near.

St. Joseph presents us with a similar, yet somewhat dif-
ferent, type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy. We know
nothing of the beginnings of this wonderful saint. Like the
fountains of the sacred river of the Egyptians, his early
years are hidden in an obscurity, which his subsequent
greatness renders beautiful, just as the sunset is reflected
in the dark and clouded east. He was doubtless high in
sanctity before his Espousals with Mary. God's eternal
choice of him would seem to imply as much. During the
nine months the accumulation of grace upon him must have
been beyond our powers of calculation. The company of
Mary, the atmosphere of Jesus, the continual presence of
the Incarnate God, and the fact of his own life being nothing
but a series of ministries to the unborn Word, must have
lifted him far above all other saints, and perchance all angels
too. Our Lord's Birth, and the sight of His Face, must
have been to him like another sanctifi cation. The mystery
of Bethlehem was enough of itself to place him among the
highest of the saints. As with Mary self-abasement was
his grandest grace. He was conscious to himself that he
was the shadow of the Eternal Father, and this knowledge
overwhelmed him. With the deepest reverence he hid
himself in the constant thought of the dignity of his office,
in the profoundest self-abjection. Commanding makes deep
men more humble than obeying. St. Joseph's humility
was fed all through life by having to command Jesus, by
being the superior of his God. The priest, who has most
reason to deplore the poverty of his attainments in humility,
is humble at least when he comes to consecrate at Mass.
For years Joseph lived in the awful sanctity of that which
to the priest is but a moment The little house at Nazareth

i83 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

was as the outspread square of the white corporal. All the
words he spoke were almost words of consecration. A life
worthy of this, up to the mark of this, — what a marvel of
sanctity it must have been !

To be hidden in God, to be lost in His bright light, is
surely the highest of vocations among the sons of men.
Nothing, to a spiritually discerning eye, can surpass the
grandeur of a life which is only for others, only ministering
to the divine purposes as in the place of God, without any
personal vocation, or any purpose of its own. This is the
exceeding magnificence of Mary, that her personality is
almost lost in her oflBcial vicinity to God. This too in its
measure was Joseph's vocation. He lives now only to serve
the Infant Jesus, as heretofore he has but lived to guard
;^^ary, the lily of God. He is as it were the head of the
Holy Family, only that, like a good superior, he may the
more completely be the servant, and the subject, and the
instrument. Moreover he makes way for Jesus, when Jesus
comes of age. He passes noiselessly into the shadow of
eternity, like the moon behind a cloud, complaining not that
her silver light is intercepted. He does not live on to the
days of the miracles and the preaching, much less to the
fearful grandeurs of Gethsemane and Calvary. His spirit
is the spirit of Bethlehem. He is, in an especial way, the
property of the Sacred Infancy. It was his one work, his
single sphere.

He is thus an object of imitation to those souls who have
seasons, when they are so possessed with devotion to the
Sacred Infancy, that it appears to them impossible to have
any devotion at all to the Passion, and who are very naturally
disquieted by this phenomenon, and distrustful of it. Singu-
larity is always to be distrusted. If we are out of sympathy
with the great multitude of common believers, the proba-
bility is that we are in a state of delusion. There are indeed

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 183

Buch things as extraordinary impulses of the Holy Ghost ;
but they are rare; and even they follow analogies, and
follow them most when they seem strangest and most sin-
gular. Thus there is no instance of any of the saints having
gone through life so absorbed in any other of our Blessed
Lord's mysteries, as to have disregarded the Passion, or not
placed it among their foremost devotions. The prominence
given to the Passion in the spiritual life of Margaret of
Beaune, especially during her latter years, is a remarkable
confirmation of this doctrine.

Yet with some there are seasons, seasons which come, and
do their work, and go, during which they seem blessedly
possessed with the spirit of Bethlehem, and in those times
nothing is seen of Calvary but its blue outline, like a moun-
tain on the horizon. Grace has something especial to do in
the soul, and it does it in this way. St. Joseph must be
our patron at those seasons, as having been sanctified him-
self with an apparent exclusiveness, by these very mysteries
of Bethlehem. Yet it was not with him, neither will it be
with us, a devotion of unmingled sweetness. At the bottom
of the Crib lies the Cross ; and the Infant's Heart is a living
Crucifix, for all He sleeps so softly and looks so fair. From
Joseph's first fear for Mary, and the mystical darkness of
his tormenting perplexity, to the very day when he laid his
tired head on the lap of his Foster-son, and slept his last
sleep, it was one continued suffering, the torture of anxiety
without the imperfection of disquietude. The very awe of
the nine months must have killed with its perpetual sacred
pressure all that was merely natural within him ; and our
inner nature never dies a painless death, as the outer some-
times does. Poverty must have appeared to him in a new
light, less easy to bear, when Jesus and Mary were concerned.
The rude men and unsympathising women of Bethlehem
were but the forerunners of the dark- eyed idolaters of Egypt,

1 84 THE l^IRST WORSHIPPERS.

with their jealous suspicions of the Hebrew stranger, while
his weak arm was the only rampart God had set round the
Mother and the Child. The flight into Egypt and the
return from it, the fears which would not let him dwell in
the Holy City, and the rustic unkindliness of the ill-famed
Nazarenes, all these were so many Calvaries to Joseph.
Sweet and beautiful as is the look of Bethlehem, they who
carry the Infant Jesus in their souls carry the Cross also,
and where He pillows His Head, He leaves the marks
behind Him of an unseen Crown of thorns. In truth, the
death of Joseph was itself a martyrdom. He was worn out
with love of the Holy Child. It was love, divine love,
which slew him ; so that his devotion was like that of the
Holy Innocents, a devotion of martyrdom and blood.

The foundation therefore of Joseph's devotion was, as with
Mary, his humility. Yet his humility was somewhat different
from hers. It was another kind of grace. It was less self-
forgetting. Its eye was always on its own unworthiness. It
was a humility that for ever seemed surprised at its own gifts
and yet so tranquil, that there was nothing in it either of
the precipitation or the ungracefulness of a surprise. He
was unselfishness itself, the very personification of it. His
whole life meant othera, and did not mean himself. This
was the significance of his vocation. He was an instrument
with a living soul, an accessory, not a principal, a superior,
only to be the more a satellite. He was simply the visible
providence of Jesus and Mary. But his unselfishness did
not take the shape of self-oblivion.

Hence his peculiar grace was self-possession. Calmness
amid anxiety, considerateness amid startling mysteries, a quiet
heart combined with an excruciating sensitiveness, a self
consciousness maintained for the single purpose of an unin-
termitting immolation of self, the promptitude of docility
grafted on the slowness of age and the measuredness of naturaj

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 185

character, unbroken sweetness amid harassing cares, abrupt
changes, and unexpected situations, a facile passiveness under
each movement of grace, each touch of God's finger, as if he
were floating over earth rather than rooted in it, the seeming
victim of a wayward romantic lot and of dark divine enigmas,
yet calm, incurious, unquestioning, unbewildered, reposing
upon God, — these are the operations of grace which seem to
us so wonderful in Joseph's soul. It was a soul, which glassed
in its pellucid tranquillity all the images of heavenly things
that were round about it When mysterious graces were
showered down upon him, there is hardly a stir to be seen
upon his silent passiveness. He seems to take them as if
they were the common sunshine, and the common air, and
the dew which fell on all men, and not on himself alone.
He was like the speechless, silver-shining, glassy lake, just
trembling with the thin noiseless raindrops, while it rather
hushes than quickens its only half audible pulses on the blue
gravelled shore. It almost seemed as if, joined with his self-
possession, there was also an unconsciousness of his great
graces, if we could think that great saints did not know their
graces as none others know them. He was not a light that
shone, he was rather an odour that breathed, in the house of
God. He was like the mountain woods in the wet weeping
summer. They speak to heaven by their manifold fragrances,
which yet make one woodland odour, like the many dialects
of a rich language, as if the fresh wind-driven drops beat the
sensitive leaves of many hidden and sequestered plants ; and
so made them give out their perfumes, just as sorrow by its
gentle bruising brings out hidden sweetness from all characters
of men. So it was with St Joseph. He moves about among
the mysteries of the Sacred Infancy, a shy silent figure.
Between the going and coming of great mysteries we just
hear him, as we hear the rain timidly whispering among the
leaves in the intervals of the deep-toned thunder. But his

1 86 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

odour is everywhere. It is the very genius of the place. It
clings to our garments and lingers in our senses, even when
we have left the Cave of Bethlehem and gone out into the
world's work.

His mind was turned inward upon his dread office, rather
than outward on the harvest of God's glory among men.
This follows from his self-possession. He stood in an official
position ; but it was only towards God, not towards both
God and men, as was our Lady's case. Hence there was
less of the spirit of oblation about Joseph than about Mary.
He and God were together. He knew not of others, except
as making him suffer, and so winning themselves titles to
his love. The sacerdotal character of Mary's holiness was
not apparent in him. He was a priest of the Infant Jesus,
neither to sacrifice Him nor to offer Him, but only to guard
Him, to handle Him with reverence and to worship Him.
Like a deacon he might bear the Precious Blood, but not
consecrate it. Or he was the priestly sacristan to whose
custody the tabernacle was committed. This was more his
office than saying Mass. All this was in keeping with his
reserve. It was to be expected that the shadow of the
Eternal Father should move without sound over the world.
Shadows speak only by the shade they cast, deepening,
beautifying, harmonising all things, filling the hearts they
cover with the mute eloquence of tenderest emotiona God
is perhaps more communicative than He is reserved. For,
though He has told us less than He has withheld, yet how
much more out of sheer love has He told us than we needed
to know; and what has He kept back except that which
because of our littleness we could not know, or that which
for our good it was better we should not know t

Some saints represent to us this communicativeness of
God, and others His reserve. St. Joseph is the head and
father of these last It is strange that while saints have

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 187

often shown forth to men the union of justice and of mercy
which there is in God, or the combination of swiftness and
of slowness in the divine operations, and others of the
apparent contrarieties in God, no saint appears to have ever
copied him in the union of communicativeness and o^ reserve.
We find that illustrated only in the Incarnate Word and His
Immaculate Mother. St. Joseph was the image of the Father.
The Father had spoken once, speaks now, His unbroken
Eternal Word. Joseph needed but to stand by in silence,
and fold gently in his arms that Word which the Father was
yet speaking. The manifested Word, the out-poured Spirit,
of Them Joseph was not the representative. They only
hung him round with the splendours of Their dear love,
because he was the image of the Father. Such does he
seem to our eyes, such is the image of him which rests in
our loving hearts, — mute, rapture-bound, awe-stricken, with
his soul tranquil, unearthly, shadowy, like the loveliness of
night, and the beautiful age upon his face speaking there
like a silent utterance, a free, placid, and melodious thanks-
giving to the Most Holy Trinity.

We find our third type of devotion to the Infant Jesus in
St. John the Baptist. As to Joseph, so also to John, Jesus
came through Mary, as He comes to us. In the sweet
sound of Mary's voice came the secret power of the Infant
Redeemer's absolving grace. John worshipped behind the
veil Him who also from behind His veil had absolved him
from his original sin, had broken his fetters, fulfilled him
with eminent holiness, and anointed him to be His own
immediate Precursor, He too, like Joseph, was simply to
be an instrument. He too was to prepare the way for the
Child of Bethlehem. His light was to fade as the light of
Jesus grew fuller on the sight of men. He too, strange
tenant of the wilderness, in grotesque apparel, companion of
angels and of wild beasts, a feeder on savage food ! he too

1 88 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

was to be hidden from the gaze of men during the long first
years of his life, as Joseph had been, and as his own fore-
runner Elias was to be through the long revolring centuries
of his closing life up to the very scenes which should herald
the coming Doom. Like Joseph, the Baptist was withdrawn
from Calrary, and stood on the borders of the Gospel light,
only half emerging from the shadows of the Old Testament.
Like Joseph, he was bidden to be our Lord's superior, but
with humility unlike that of Joseph, and yet a veritable
humility, he argued against his own elevation, and bowed
only to the gentle command of Him who sought baptism at
his hands, and gave for others a cleansing sacramental power
to the water that could but simulate ablution to His spotless
SouL His too was a hennit spirit, like Joseph's ; but his
was calmly cradled in the solitudes of the desert, not chafed
evermore by the crowding of uncongenial men. He was a
light that burned as well as shone, and of him it was that
the Incarnate Word declared that none born of woman had
yet been so great as he. He also belongs, like Joseph, to
the Sacred Infancy, handing over his followers to Jesus,
ending where his Lord began, like the moon setting as the
sun rises, and like the Holy Innocents, worshipping his
Saviour with his blood.

The Baptist was our Lord's first convert. His redemption
was, so to speak, the first sacrament which Jesus administered.
Through Mary's voice the gift of original justice was miracu-
lously given him, the complete use of reason conferred upon
him, and the immense graces communicated to him, which
were implied in his extraordinary office and our Lord's mar-
vellous words about him. When we consider all these
things, our Lord's quickening His Mother's steps to go and
work this stupendous conversion, the grandeur of the mission
to which Elizabeth's unborn child was destined, his exulting
use of the reason supematurally anticipated in his soul, hii

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 189

redemption aa the first work of our Lord's love of souls in
person, and possibly the next step in the scale of graces
to the Immaculate Conception, and his reception of all
these things through the sweet mouth and salutation
of Mary, we may form some idea of the characteristics
of hii devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem. Christian art
has loved to depict them as children together. Yet the
thought ii most overwhelming, when we come to meditate
upon it Art can never express our Lord's Divinity, and
so all devotional pictures fall short of the visions of oui
prayers.

With what haste, as if Mary's haste to him were passed
into his spirit and had become the law and habit of his life,
would not St. John press into the presence of Jesus, his soul
bounding with the exultation of his sinless sanctity, his
heart overflowing with the exuberance of speechless grati-
tude, feasting his eyes on the beauty of that Face, while the
Mother's accent in the Child's voice thrilled through his
whole being, like the keen tremulous piercings of an ecstasy !
Yet how, while he ran forward with all this in his soul,
would it not be arrested all at once, and changed to some-
thing unspeakably higher, as he passed within the circle of
our Lord's Divinity ! How his thanksgiving, which thought
to be so eloquent, would be offered in a songlike silence to
the Incarnate God, while sacred fear would turn his spell-
bound gladness to mutest adoration, and his gratitude become
speechless before the majesty of the Eternal, thus trans-
parently veiled in human flesh ! He would tremble with
delighted awe, while he felt the streams of grace, ever flow-
ing, ever new, flooding his glorious soul from the nearness
of the Divine Child. Exultation, gratitude, generosity with
God, a magnificent incapacity of consorting with earthly
things, these were obviously the characteristics of his devo-
tion to the Babe of Bethlehem. Happy they who catch his

I90 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

spirit ! Happy they on whom God bestows an especial
attraction to this resplendent saint 1

Attraction to St. John the Baptist is one of the ways to
Jesus, and a way of His own appointment, and upon which
therefore a peculiar blessing rests. He was chosen to prepare
men's hearts to be the thrones of their Lord. It was even
he who laid the foundations of the college of the Apostles
in Peter and Andrew and John, who were his disciples.
Attractiveness was hung around the Baptist like a spell.
In what did it consist 1 Doubtless in gifts of nature as well
as grace ; for such is God's way. Yet it is difficult to see in
what it resided. As the world counts things he was an
uncouth man. The savage air of the wilderness affected his
rugged sweetness. His austerity, we might have imagined,
had not the lives of the saints in all ages taught us differ-
ently, would have driven men away from him either as an
example or a teacher. His teaching was ungrateful to cor-
rupt nature. It was reforming, unsparing, and dealt mainly
in condemnations. Its manner was vehement, abrupt, and
singularly without respect of persons. Yet all men gathered
near him, even while he taught that his teaching was not
final, that his mission was but a preparation, and that he
was not the deliverer whom they sought. All classes, trades,
ranks, and professions fluttered round him, like moths round
the candle, sure to be scorched by his severity, yet, whether
they would or not, attracted to his light

What could his attraction be but the sweet spirit of
Bethlehem, the spirit of exultation, of generosity, of un-
earthliness, of the freshness of abounding grace? The whole
being of that austere man, most awe-inspiring as he was of
all anchorets that ever were, was overflowed with gladness.
He had drunk the wine of the Precious Blood, when it was
at its newest, and he was blessedly intoxicated to the last
It was said of him before he was born, that at his birth men

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 191

should rejoice, and yet there seemed no obvious reason that
it should be so. When he heard the sound of Mary's voice,
he leaped with exultation in his mother's womb. It was the
gladness of grace. It was the triumph of redeeming love.
It was the first and freshest victory of the little Conqueror
of Bethlehem. When his ears were first opened with the
new gift of reason, the sounds that smote them were from
Mary singing her Magnificat. How could a life ever know
sadness, that had so joyous, so musical a beginning 1

In very childhood he went away into the wilderness, lest
the world should break the charm that was around his souL
He who did no miracles was himself a miracle. His life
was a portent. As Elias is hidden now on some bare cloud-
capped mountain or in the shades of unknown groves, wear-
ing out in placid ecstasies his patient expectant age, so John,
who was both successor and forerunner of Elias, was hidden
in the wilderness, with the beautiful spirit of Bethlehem
within his soul, alluring angels to the desert spot, soothing
the fierce natures of the beasts, making him insensible to
the wayward tyranny of the elements, and nurturing his
soul in spiritual grandeur. Innocent as he was, he would
do penance as if he were a sinner, partly because he would
not be outdone in generosity by God, and partly, because
the spirit of Bethlehem led him, like the Holy Child, to
love hardship and to espouse poverty. Such was the child
of the Precious Blood, whose unborn soul had been steeped
in the beauty of the Magnificat. Such was the first con-
quest of the Babe of Bethlehem, the fair creation of grace
which the Infant Creator in one instant made through the
sound of His mother's voice. Happy they, who, by a special
devotion to him, make themselves the companions of him
who was the companion of the Infant Jesus !

Our fourth type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy is to
be found in the Angels. How be^^utiful to our eyes is that

192 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

vast angelic world, with its various kingdoms of holy
wonders and of spiritual magnificence ! It is well worth
while for a theologian to spend his whole life, lying on the
confines of that bright creation, to mark the lights and
gleams which come to him from out of those realms of the
eldest-born sons of God. It is not only sweet to learn of
those whose companions in bliss we hope some day to be,
and one of whose royal princes is ever at our side even now,
ennobling rather than demeaning himself by ministries of
secret love. But it is sweeter still to know so much more of
God as even our imperfect theology of the Angels can teach
us. No one knows the loveliness of moonlight till he has
beheld it on the sea. So does the ocean of angelic life on
its clear field of boundless waters reflect, and as it were
magnify by its reflection, the shining of God's glory. Devo-
tion to the Angels is a devotion which emancipates the soul
from littleness, and gives it blissful habits of unearthly
thought. Purer than the driven snow are all those countless
spirits, pure in the exuberance of their own beautiful natures,
not by the toilsome chastening of austerity, nor by the quick
or gradual death of nature at the hands of grace. Mary,
their queen, looks down into them for evermore, and the
white light of her exceeding purity is reflected in them, as
in deep still waters. They come nearest to God, and it is
one of the rubrics of heaven's service that the incense of
men's prayers should be burned before God by Angels.

Yet they are our kin. We look up to them more as elder
brothers, than as creatures set far apart from us by the pre-
eminence of their natures. We love them with a yearning
love j we make sure of being the comrades of their eternal
joys ; we even imitate their impossible heights without
despair ; for their beauty invigorates, rather than disheartens
us. It is an endless delight to us that they serve God so
well, while we are serving Him so poorly, and that they

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 193

themselves so abound in love, that they joy in the love of
men. Yet truly why should they not prize what even God
so ineffably desires t Beautiful land ! beautiful bright
people ! how wonderfully the splendour of creation shines
in them, while from off their ceaseless wings they are ever
scattering lights and odours, which are all of God and from
God's home, and make us homesick, as exiles are who smell
some native almost-forgotten flower, or hear the strains of
some long-silent patriotic melody. No cold gulf is between
us and those angelic spirits. Like a ship that hangs upon a
summer sea with its fair white sails, and one while seems to
belong to the blue deep, and another while to be rather a
creature of the sunny air, so do the dear Angels hang, and
brood, and float over this sea of human joys and sorrows,
never too high above us to be beyond our reach, and more
often mingling, like Raphael, their unsullied light with our
darkness, as if they were but the best, the kindest, and the
noblest of ourselves.

Immense was their devotion to the Babe of Bethlehem.
He was the cause of their perseverance and its means. There
is not a grace in the deep treasuries of their rapturous being,
which is not from the Babe of Bethlehem, and from Him,
not simply as the Word, but as the Incarnate Word. It
was the vision of His Sacred Humanity which was at once
their trial, their sanctification, and their perseverance. The
Babe of Bethlehem was shown to them amid the central fires
of the Godhead, and they adored, and loved, and humbled
themselves before that lower nature which it was His good
pleasure to assume. They greeted with acclamations of
exulting loyalty the announcement that His mortal Mother
was to be their queen. They longed for the day when
Anna's child should gladden the distant earth, and heaven
has scarce heard sweeter music than they made on the day
she was assumed and crowned. Thus devotion to the Holy

N

194 T^HE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

Child was more than a devotion to them ; it was their salva-
tion ; it was their religion. They almost longed it was their
redemption also. If the weakness and infirmity of His
Incarnation was a glorious probation to them, and to their
fallen brethren a fatal stumbling-block, the littleness and
seeming dishonour of His Childhood formed as it were the
extreme case of the Incarnation ; for they had not even the
dignity of victim and of sacrifice which clad as with a mantle
the shame and violence of Calvary.

We cannot doubt therefore of their special attraction to
the Sacred Infancy. Chistmas has always seemed to all
men as one of the Angels' feasts. With what holy envy
then must they not have regarded the fortunate Gabriel,
waiting on Daniel, the man of desires, and inspiring him
with sweet precipitate prophecies, and still more when he
went forth on his embassies that were preparatory to the
great mystery, bearing messages to Joachim and Anna, to
Zacharias and Elizabeth ; but most of all they envied him
when he went to Nazareth at midnight and saluted Mary
with a salutation which was not his alone, but the salutation
of the whole angelic world, and then stood back a little in
blissful trembling reverence, while the Eternal Spirit over-
shadowed their young queen, and the sweet mystery was
accomplished. They envied Michael, the official guardian
of the Sacred Humanity, whose zeal devoured his unconsum-
ing spirit even as the zeal of Jesus devoured the Sacred
Heart. They envied Raphael, the manlike Angel, the healer
and the redeemer, because he was so like to Jesus in his
character, and made such beautiful revelations of the pathos
there was in God.

But they did not envy Michael or Raphael as they envied
the fortunate Gabriel Oh how for nine months they hung
about the happy Mother, the living tabernacle of the Incom-
prehensible Creator! Yet none but Gabriel might speak,

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 195

none but Gabriel float over Joseph in his sleep and whisper
to him heavenly words in the thick of his anxious dreama
But when the Little Flower came up from underground, and
bloomed visibly in Bethlehem at midnight, and filled the
world with sudden fragrance, winter though it was, and
dark, and in a sunless Cave, then heaven was allowed to
open, and their voices and their instruments were given to
the Angels, and the floodgates of their impatient jubilee
were drawn up, and they were bidden to sing such strains
of divinest triumph, as the listening earth had never heard
before, not even when those same morning-stars had sung at
its creation, such strains as were meet only for a triumph
where the Everlasting God was celebrating the victories of
His boundless love. Down into the deep seas flowed the
celestial harmony. Over the mountain-tops the billows of
the glorious music rolled. The vast vaults of the purple
night rung with it in clear liquid resonance. The clouds
trembled in its undulations. Sleep waved its wings, and
dreams of hope fell upon the sons of men. The inferior
creatures were hushed and soothed. The very woods stood
still in the night breeze, and the starlit rivers flowed more
silently to hear. The flowers distilled double perfumes as
if they were bleeding to death with their unstanched sweet-
ness. Earth herself felt lightened of her load of guilt ; and
distant worlds, wheeling far ofi" in space, were inundated
with the angelic melody. Silent, in impatient adoration,
they had leaned over towards earth at the moment of the
Incarnation. Silent, and scarce held in by the omnipotent
hand of God, they pressed like walls of burning fire around
the Cross on Calvary. But at Bethlehem the waters of
their inward jubilee burst forth unreproved, and over-ran all
God's creation with the wondrous spells of that Gloria in
excelsis, which is itself, not only a beautiful revelation of
angelic nature, but also the worship round the Throne made

196 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

for one moment audible on this low-lying eartK Who
does not see that Bethlehem was the predilection of the
Angels t

It is not possible for us to apprehend all the spiritual
beauty which lay deep down, glorifying God, in this devo-
tion of the Angels. It was plainly a devotion of joy, of
such joy as Angels can feel. It was joy in a mystery long
pondered, long expected, yet whose glory took them by
surprise when at length it came. It was at once a joy that
so much was now fulfilled, and also that God had, as usual,
so outstripped all hopes in the fulfilment. It was a joy
full of unselfishness towards men, whose nature was at that
moment so gently, yet so irresistibly, triumphing over theirs.
In their song they made no mention of themselves, only of
God in the highest, and then of men on earth. How beauti-
ful, how holy is this silence about themselves ! They gave
way to their younger brothers with the infinite gracefulness
which nothing but genuine superiority can show. It was
a joy full of intelligent adoration of the Word, an intel-
ligence which none on earth could equal but the Mother of
the Word. It was thus a reparation for the ignorance of
man, for the rudeness of Bethlehem, and for all that was
yet to come of the inhospitality of earth to its Incarnate
Maker. It was more like Mary's worship than like Joseph's,
because it was so fuU of self-oblivion. If an Angel could
ever be otherwise than self-possessed, we might have called
it too spontaneous to be recollected, too jubilant to be self-
abased. It was more like an outburst of grandeur which
they could not help, than an offering of deliberate and
meditative worship. It was the overflow of heaven seeking
fresh room for itself on earth. It was also a devotion like
the Baptist's ; for it was freighted with long ages of angelic
gratitude, teeming with mysterious memories of their ancient
probation, the welcome beatitude of the reality of that

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 197

primal worship, in whose visionary beauty their predestina-
tion had been accomplished.

From the Angels who sang we pass to the Shepherds who
heard their heavenly songs, a simple audience, yet such as
does not ill assort with a divine election. They are our
fifth type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy. We know
nothing of their antecedents. We know nothing of what
followed their privileged worship of the Babe. They come
out of the cloud for a moment. We see them in the star-
light of the clear winter night. A divine halo is around
them. They are chosen from among men. Angels speak
to them. We hear of the Shepherds themselves speaking
to others of the wondrous Babe that they had seen, a King,
a concealed King, born in a Stable-cave, yet for all that a
heavenly King. Then the clouds close over again. The
Shepherds disappear. We know no more of them. Their
end is as hidden as their beginning was. Yet when a light
from God falls upon a man, it betokens something in his
antecedents, which heaven has given him, or which has
attracted heaven. Those lights do not fall by accident,
like the chance sunbeams let through the rents in the
pavilion of the clouds, shedding a partial glory with their
transient gleams on rock and wood and fern and the many-
coloured moss-cushioned water-courses, but leaving others
in the cold shade that are as beautiful as those which they
carelessly illumine. Their early history is as obscure to us
as that of Joseph. Nor are they unlike Joseph. They
have his hiddenness and his simplicity, without the self-
awed majesty of his stupendous office. They were self-
possessed, not by the hold which an interior spirit gave
them over themselves, but through their extreme simplicity.
An angel spoke to them, and they were neither humbled by
it, nor elated ; they are only afraid of the great light around
them. It was as much a matter of course to them, so far

198 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

as belief in the intelligence, as if some belated peasant
neighbour had passed by them on their pastoral watch, and
told them some strange news. To simple minds, as to deep
ones, everything is its own evidence. They heard the
angelic chorus, and were soothed by it, and yet reflected
not upon the honour done themselves who were admitted to
be its audience. Theirs was the simplicity of a childlike
holiness, which does not care to discriminate between the
natural and the supernatural. Their restful souls were all
life long becalmed in the thought of God.

The faith and promptitude of simplicity are not less
heroic than those of wisdom. The Shepherds fell not
below the Kings in the exercise of these great virtues.
But there was less self-consciousness in the promptitude of
the Shepherds than in the marvellous docility and swift
sacrifice of the Kings. They represent also the place which
simplicity occupies in the kingdom of Christ ; for, next to
that of Mary and Joseph, theirs was the first external
worship earth offered to the newborn Babe of Bethlehem.

Simplicity comes very near to God, because boldness is
one of its most congenial graces. It comes near, because
it is not dreaming how near it comes. It does not think
of itself at all, even to realise its own unworthiness ; and
therefore it hastens when a more self-conscious reverence
would be slow ; and it is at home, where another kind of
sanctity would be waiting for permissions. It is startled
sometimes, like a timid fawn, and once startled it is not
easily reassured. Such souls are not so much humble as
they are simple. The same end is attained in them by
a different grace, producing a kindred yet almost a more
beautiful holiness. In like manner as simplicity is to them
in the place of humility, joy often satisfies in them the
claims of adoration. They come to God in an artless way,
with a sort of unsuspecting effrontery of love, and when

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 19$

they have come to Him, they simply rejoice, and nothing
more. It is their way of adoring Him. It fits in with the
rest of their graces; and their simplicity makes all har-
monious. There is something almost rustic at times in the
way in which such souls take great graces and divine con-
fidences as matters of course, and the Holy Spirit sports
with their simplicity and singleness of souL They are for
ever children, and, by an instinct, haunt the sanctuaries of
the Sacred Infancy. Their perfection is in truth, a mystical
childhood, reflecting, almost perpetuating, the Childhood
of our dearest Lord.

How beautifully too is our Lord's attraction to the lowly
represented in the call of these rough, childlike, pastoral
men ! Outside the Cave, He calls the Shepherds first of all.
They are men who have lived in the habits of the meek
creatures they tend, until their inward life has caught habits
of a kindred sort. They lie out at night on the cold moun-
tain-side, or in the chill blue mist of the valley. They hear
the winds moan over the earth, and the rude rains beat
them during the sleepless night. The face of the moon has
become familiar to them, and the silent stars mingle more
with their thoughts than they themselves suspect. They
are poor and hardy, nursed in solitude and on scant living,
dwellers out of doors and not in the bright cheer of domestic
homes.

Such are the men the Babe calls first ; and they come as
their sheep would come to their own call. They come to
worship Him, and the worship of their simplicity is joy, and
the voice of joy is praise. God loves the praises of the
lowly. There is something grateful to Him in the faith,
something confiding in the love, which emboldens the lowly
to offer Him the tribute of their praise. He loves also the
praises of the gently, meekly happy. Happiness is the
temper of holiness ; and, if the voice of patient anguish is

200 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

praise to God, much more is the clear voice of happiness, a
happiness that fastens not on created things, but is centred
in Himself. They have hardly laid hold of God who are
not supremely happy even in the midst of an inferior and
sensible unhappiness. They, whose sunshine is from Him
who is within them, worship God brightly out of a blessed-
ness which the world cannot touch, because it gushes up-
wards from a sanctuary that lies too deep for rifling. Sad-
ness is a sort of spiritual disability. A melancholy man can
never be more than a convalescent in the house of God. He
may think much of God, but he worships very little. God
has rather to wait upon him as his infirmarian, than he to
wait on God as his Father and his King. There is no moral
imbecility so great as that of querulousness and sentimen-
tality. Joy is the freshness of our spirits. Joy is the life-
long morning of our souls, an habitual sunrise out of which
worship and heroic virtue come. Sprightly and grave, swift
and self -forgetting, meditative and daring, with its faiths all
sights and its hopes all certainties, full of that blessed self-
deceit of love that it must give to God more than it receives,
and yet for ever finding out with delighted surprise that it
is in truth always and only receiving, — such is the devotion
of the happy man. To the happy man all duties are easy
because all duties are new ; and they are always done with
the freshness and alacrity of novelty. They are like our old
familiar woods, which, as each day they glisten in the dawn,
look each day like a new, unvisited, and foreign scene.

But he, who lies down at full length on life, as if it were
a sick-bed, — poor languishing soul ! what will he ever do for
God ? The very simplicity of the Shepherds would not let
them keep their praise a secret to themselves. If there are
saints who keep secrets for God's glory, there are saints also
whose way of worshipping His glory is to tell the wonders
which He has let them see. But such saints must have a

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 201

rare simplicity for their presiding grace, and this simplicity
is a better shield than secrecy. Thus secrecy, which is
almost a universal need of souls, is no necessity for them.
Hence the Shepherds were the first apostles, the apostles of
the Sacred Infancy. The first apostles were shepherds, the
second fishermen. Sweet allegory ! it is thus that God
reveals Himself by His choices, and there are volumes of
revelation in each choice.

The figures of the Shepherds have grown to look so natural
to us in our thought-pictures of Bethlehem, that it almost
seems now as if they were inseparable from it, and indis-
pensable to the mystery. What a beautiful congruity there
is between the part they play, and their pastoral occupation !
The very contrasts are congruities. Heaven opens, and
reveals itself to earth, making itself but one side of the choir
to sing the office of the Nativity, while earth is to be the
other ; and earth's answer to the open heavens is the pastoral
gentleness of those simple-minded watchmen. She sets her
Shepherds to match the heavenly singers, and counts their
simplicity her most harmonious response to angelical intelli-
gence. Truly earth was wise in this her deed, and teaches
her sons philosophy. It was congruous too, that simplicity
should be the first worship which the outer world sent into
the Cave of Bethlehem.

For what is the grace of simplicity but a permanent child-
hood of the soul, fixed there by a special operation of the
Holy Ghost ; and therefore a fitting worship for the Holy
Child Himself? Their Infant-like heavenly-mindedness
suited His infantine condition, as well as it suited the purity
of the heavenly hosts that were singing in the upper air.
Beautiful figures ! on whom God's light rested for a moment,
and then all was dark again ! they were not mere shapes of
light, golden imaginings, ideal forms, that filled in the
Divine Artist's mysterious picture. They were living souls,

202 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

tender yet not faultless men, with inequalities in the
monotony of their human lot that often lowered them in
temper and in repining to the level of those around them.
They were not so unlike ourselves, though they float in the
golden haze of a glorious picture. They fell back out of the
strong light unrepiningly, to their sheepflocks and their
night-watches. Their after years were hidden in the pathetic
obscurity, which is common to all blameless poverty ; and
they are hidden now in the sea of light which lies like a
golden veil of mist close round the throne of the Incarnate
Word.

But now a change comes over the scene, which seems at
first sight but little in keeping with the characteristic lowli-
ness of Bethlehem. A cavalcade from the far east comes
up this way. Tlie camel bells are tingling. A retinue of
attendants accompanies three Kings of diflferent oriental
tribes, who come with their various ofl'erings to the new-bom
Babe. It is a history more romantic than romance itself
would dare to be. Those swarthy men are among the wisest
of the studious east. They represent the lore and science of
their day. Yet have they done what the world would surely
esteem the most foolish of actions. They were men whose
science led them to God, men we may be sure of meditative
habits, of ascetic lives, and of habitual prayer. The frag-
ments of early tradition and the obscure records of ancient
prophecies, belonging to their nations, have been to them as
precious deposits which spoke of God and were filled with
hidden truth. The corruption of the world, which they as
Kings might see from their elevation far and wide, pressed
heavily upon their loving hearts. They too pined for a
Redeemer, for some heavenly Visitant, for a new beginning
of the world, for the coming of a Son of God, for one who
should save them from their sins. Their tribes doubtless
lived in close alliance; and they themselves were bound

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 201

together by the ties of a friendship, which the same pure
yearnings after greater goodness and higher things cemented.
Never yet had Kings more royal souls. In the dark blue of
the lustrous sky there rose a new or hitherto unnoticed star.
Its apparition could not escape the notice of these oriental
sages, who nightly watched the skies ; for their science was
also their theology. It was the star of which an ancient
prophecy had spoken. Perhaps it drooped low towards
earth, and wheeled a too swift course to be like one of the
other stars. Perhaps it trailed a line of light after it, slowly
yet with visible movement, and so little above the hori
zon, or with such obvious downward slanting course, that it
seemed as if it beckoned to them, as if an angel were bearing
a lamp to light the feet of pilgrims, and timed his going to
their slowness, and had not shot too far ahead during the
bright day, but was found and welcomed each night as a
faithful indicator pointing to the Cave of Bethlehem.

How often God prefers to teach by night rather than by
day ! Meanwhile doubtless the instincts of the Holy Spirit
in the hearts of these wise rulers drew them towards the
star. They followed it as men follow a vocation, hardly
seeing clearly at first that they are following a divine lead.
Wild and romantic as the conduct of these wise enthusiasts
seemed, they did not hesitate. After due counsel they pro-
nounced the luminous finger to be the star of the old pro-
phecy, and therefore God was come. They left their homes,
their state, and their affairs, and journeyed westward, they
knew not whither, led nightly by the star that slipped
onwards in its silent groove. They were the representatives
of the heathen world moving forward to the feet of the
universal Saviour. They came to the gates of Jerusalem ;
and there God did honour to His Church. He withdrew
the guidance of the star, because now the better guidance of
the synagogue was at their command. The Jracles of the

204 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

law pronounced that Bethlehem was to be the birthplace of
Messias ; and the wise men passed onwards to the humble
village. Again the star shone out in the blue heavens, and
slowly sank earthward over the Cave of Bethlehem, and
presently the devout Kings were at the feet of Jesus.

It would take a whole volume to comment to the full on this
sweet legend of the gospel. The babe, it seems, will move
the heights of the world as well as the lowlands. He will
now call wisdom to His crib, as He has but lately called
simplicity. Yet how different is His call ! For wise men
and for Kings some signs were wanted, and, because they
were wise Kings, scientific signs. As the sweet patience
and obscure hardships of a lowly life prepared the souls of
the Shepherds, so to the Kings their years of oriental lore
were as the preparation of the gospel Yet true science has
also its child-like spirit, its beautiful simplicity. Learning
makes children of its professors, when their hearts are humble
and their lives pure. It was a simple thing of them to leave
their homes, their latticed palaces or their royal tents. They
were simple too, when they were in their trouble at Jeru-
salem, because of the disappearance of the star. But when
the end of all broke upon them, when the star left them at
that half stable and half cave, and they beheld a Child of
abject poverty, lying in a manger upon straw between an ox
and an ass, with, as the world would speak, an old artisan
of the lower class to represent His father, and a girlish, ill-
assorted Mother, then was the triumph of their simplicity.
They hesitated not for one moment. There was no inward
questioning as to whether there was a divine likelihood
about all this. Their inward eye was cleansed to see divine
things with an unerring clearness, and to appreciate them
with an instantaneous accuracy. They had come all that
way for this. They had brought their gleaming metals and
rich frankincense to the caverned cattle-shed, where the

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 205

myrrh alone seemed in keeping with the circumstances of
the Child. They were content. It was not merely all they
wanted ; it was more than they wanted, more than they had
ever dreamed. Who could come to Jesus and to Mary, and
not go away contented, if their hearts were pure, — go away
contented, yet not content to go away ? How kingly seemed
to them the poverty of that Babe of Bethlehem, how right
royal that sinless Mother's lap on which He was enthroned !
The grand characteristic of their devotion was its faith.
Next to Peter's and to Abraham's there never in the world
was faith like theirs. Faith is what strikes us in them at
every turn, and faith that was from the first heroic. Had
they not all their lives long been out-looking for the Promised
One, and what was that but faith 1 They rested in faith on
the old traditions, which their Bedouin or Hindoo tribes had
kept. They had utter faith in the ancient prophecies. They
had faith in the star when they beheld it, and such faith that
no worldly considerations could stand before its face. The
star led them on by inland track or by ribbed sea shore ; but
their faith never wavered. It disappeared at Jerusalem, and
straightway everything about them was at fault except their
faith. The star hi A gone. Faith sought the synagogue,
and acted on the words of the teachers. Faith lighted up
the Cave when they entered it, and let them not be scanda-
lised with the scandal of the Cross. They had faith in the
warning that came to them by dream, and they obeyed.
Faith is the quickest of all learners ; for it soon loses itself
in that love which sees and understands all things at a
glance. How many men think to cure their spiritual ills by
increasing their love, when they had better be cultivating
their faith ! So in this one visit to Bethlehem the Kings
learned the whole Gospel, and left the Babe perfect theo-
logians and complete apostles. They taught in their own
lands the faith which was all in all to them. They held on

2o6 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

through persecution, won souls to Christ, spread memories
of Mary, and shed their blood joyously for a faith they felt
too cheaply purchased, too parsimoniously requited, by the
sternest martyrdom.

We must mark also how detachment went along with
faith, detachment from home, from royalty, from popularity,
from life itself. So it always is. Faith and detachment are
inseparable graces. They are twins of the soul, and grow
together, and are so like they can hardly be distinguished,
and they live together in such one- hearted sympathy, that it
seems as if they had but one life between them, and must
needs die together. Detachment is the right grace for tlie
noble, the right grace for the rich, the right grace for the
learned. Let us feed our faith, and so shall we become
detached. He, who is ever looking with straining eyes at
the far mountains of the happy land beyond the sea, cheats
himself of many a mile of weary distance ; and while the
slant columns of white wavering rain are sounding over the
treeless moorland, and beating like scourges upon him, he is
away in the green sunshine that he sees beyond the gulf,
and the storm growls past him as if it felt he was no victim.
This is the picture of detachment, forgetting all things in
the sweet company of its elder twin-brother faith. Thus
may we say of these three royal sages, that their devotion
was one of faith up to seeming folly, as the wise man's
devotion always is, of generosity up to romance, and of
perseverance up to martyrdom.

These three Kings, like the Shepherds, are beautiful figures
in the Cave of Bethlehem, because the attractions of Jesus
are so sweetly exemplified in them. He has drawn them
from the far Orient by the leading-string of a floating star.
He has drawn them into the darkness of His ignoble poverty,
into the shame of His neglected obscurity, and they have
gone from Him with their souls replenished with His love-

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 207

liness. There is something exotic in the beauty of the whole
mystery. It reads in St. Matthew like a foreign legend :
and why should it be in St. Matthew's Gospel when it
should naturally have been in St. Luke's 1 It seems to float
over the Sacred Infancy more like an unchained cloud, that
anchors itself in the breathless sunny calm for a while, and
then sails off, or melts into the blue. As the congruity of the
Shepherds was beautiful, so the apparent incongruity of the
Magians is in its own way beautiful as well.

What right had ingots of ruddy gold to be gleaming in
the Cave of Bethlehem? Arabian perfumes were meetei
for Herod's halls than for the cattle-shed scooped in the
gloomy rock. The myrrh truly was in its place, however
costly it might be ; for it prophesied in pathetic silence of
that bitter-sweet quintessence of love, which should be
extracted for men from the Sacred Humanity of the Babe
in the press of Calvary. Yet myrrh was a strange omen
for a Babe who was the splendour of heaven and the joy
of earth. How unmeet were all these things, and yet in
their deep significance how meet ! The strange secrecy too,
with which this kingly oriental progress, with picturesque
costumes, and jewelled turbans, and the dark-faced slaves,
and the stately stepping camels, passed over many regions,
makes it seem still more like a visionary splendour, a many-
coloured apparition, and not a sober mystery of the humble
Incarnate Word. It is a bright vision of old heathen faith,
of the first heathen faith that worshipped Mary's Son, and
it is beautiful enough to give us faith in its own divinity.
Yet it almost makes Bethlehem too beautiful. It dazzles
us with its outward show, and makes the Cave look dark,
when its oriental witchery has passed away. They, who
dwell much in the world of the Sacred Infancy, know how
oftentimes meditation on the Kings is too stirring and
exciting for the austere tranquillity of contemplation, too

2^8 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

manifold in the objects it brings before us, too various in
the images it leaves behind. Truly it is beautiful beyond
words ! a household mystery to those eagles of prayer, tc
whom beauty brings tranquillity, because they live in the
upper voiceless sunshine ! With most of us it is not so.
They who feed on beauty must feed quietly, or it will not
nurture the beautiful within them.

But our seventh type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy
brings us to a very different picture. The world of the
Church is itself a hidden world ; but even within it there
is another world still more deeply hidden. It is the very
cloister of the Holy Ghost, though without any show of
cloister, a world of humblest peace, of shyest love, and of
most secret communion with God. It gives us much to
think of, but little to say. There is little to describe in its
variety, but much in its heavenly union to feed the repose
of prayer. The gorgeous apparition of the Kings in the
gloomy Cave has passed away. The Babe too has left the
Cave. Our present picture is the same humble mystery of
Bethlehem which is now enacted on a gorgeous scene. We
must pass to the glorious courts of the magnificent temple,
when its little unknown Master has come to take possession,
the true High Priest with a thicker veil of incredible humi-
liation round Him than that which shrouded the local Holy
of Holies from the gazing multitude. It is the mystery of
Mary's jubilee, the Presentation of our Lord, mingling with
that true-hearted deceit of humility, her needless Purification.
The Babe's new worshippers are Simeon and Anna, who so
resemble each other amidst their differences that we may
regard them as forming one type of worship. Anna was
a widow of the tribe of Aser, who filled no place in the
public eye, but in whom her little circle of friends had
recognised and revered the spirit of prophecy from time
to time. She thus had an obscure sphere of influence oi

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 20^

her own. She was a figure familiar to the eyes of many in
Jerusalem, whose piety led them to the morning sacrifices
in the temple. Bowed down with the weight of fourscore
years and four, her own house was not her home, even if
she had a house she could call her own. The temple was
her home. It was rarely that she left its hallowed precincts.
She performed in her single self the offices of a whole
religious community ; for she carried on the unbroken round
of her adoration through the night as well as through the
day. Long past the age when bodily macerations form an
indispensable element in holiness, her life was nevertheless
a continual fast. Prayer was the work of her life, and
penance its recreation. Herod most likely had never heard
of her, but she was dear to God, and was known honourably
to His servants : God has widows like her in all Christian
cities.

Simeon also was worn out with age and watching. He
had placed himself on the battlements of Sion, and, while
his eyes were filled with the sweet tears of prayer, he was
ever looking out for Messias that was to come. Good people
knew him well, and they said of him that he was a just
man. Even and fair, striving for nothing, claiming no
privileges, ready to give way, most careful to be prompt
and full and considerate and timely in all his dealings with
others, giving no ground for complaint to any one, modest
and self-possessed, attentive yet unobtrusive, such was the
character he bore among those of his religious fellow-citizens
to whom he was known. But to the edification of his
justice he added the beautiful and captivating example of
the tenderest piety. Devotion was the very life of his soul.
The gift of piety reigned in his heart. Like many holy
persons, he had set his affections on what seemed like an
earthly beatific vision. He must see the Lord's Christ
before he dies.

O

210 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

There is a look of something obstinate and fanciful in
his devotion : it is in reality a height of holiness. He has
cast his spiritual life in one mould ; it was a life of desire,
a life of watching, a life of long-delayed but never despon-
dent waiting for the consolation of Israel There is a
humble pertinacity about his prayer, which is to bend
God's will to his own. It was a mighty fire of love which
burned in his simple heart, and the Holy Ghost loved to
dwell among its guileless flames. It was revealed to him
that his obstinate waiting had been a dear worship to God,
that he should have his will, and that he should see with
his aged eyes the beauty of the Lord's Christ, before he was
called away from earth. He therefore was a haunter of
the temple ; for where should he be more likely to meet the
Christ than there? How God always gives more than He
promises ! Simeon did not only see the Christ, but was
allowed to take Him up in his arms, and doubtless to print
a kiss of trembling reverence upon the Creator's human lips.
How else could his lips have ever sung so beautiful a song,
a song so sunset-like that one might believe all the beauty
of all earth's beautiful evenings since creation had gone into
it to fill it f uU of peaceful spells ? He was old for a poet ;
but his age has not dried or drained his heart.

The infirm old man held bravely in his arms the strength
of the Omnipotent. He held up the light of the world on
high in the midst of His own temple, just before he himself
was lost in the inaccessible light of a glorious eternity. His
weak eyes, misty with age and dim with tears, looked into
the deep eyes of the Babe of Bethlehem, and to his faith
they were fountains of eternal light. This was the vision
that he had been seeing all his life long. He had wept over
the drooping fortunes of Israel, but much more over the
shepherdless wanderings of the souls of his dear country-
meiL But he had ever seen through his tears i as we maj

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 211

Bee tlirough a thick storm of rain, waving like a ponderous
curtain to and fro, while the wind is slowly undrawing it,
a green mountain, bright and sunstricken, with patches of
illuminated yellow corn upon its sides, and strips of green
ferny moorland, and jutting knolls of purple heather, and
the wet silvery shimmering on the roofs of men's dwellings.

Now the evening of life was come. The rain was passed
away, and the Lord's mountain came out, not bright and
radiant only, but so astonishingly near that he might have
thought his eyes were but deceiving him. But no ! the face
of Jesus was close to his. Heaven had come to him on
earth. It was the heaven of his own choosing, Strange
lover of his land and people ! he had preferred to see Jesus
on earth, and so be sure that now poor Israel might possess
Him, rather than have gone long since by an earlier death
to have seen the Word through the quiet dimness of Abraham's
Bosom. Was it not the loveliest of mysteries to see those
arms, that were shaking and unsteady with long lapse of
time, so fondly enfolding the ever-young eternity of God 1
Was it not enough for Simeon ? Oh was it not unspeakably
more than enough 1 As nightingales are said to have sung
themselves to death, so Simeon died, not of the sweet weari-
ness of his long watching, but of the fulness of his content-
ment, of the satisfaction of his desires, of the very new youth
of soul which the touch of the Eternal Child had infused
into his age, and breaking forth into music which heaven
itself might envy and could not surpass, he died with his
world-soothing song upon his lips.

There is a little world of such souls, as Simeon and Anna,
within the Church. But it lies deep down, and its inmates
are seldom brought to the light, even by the honours of
canonisation. It is a subterranean world, the diamond-mine
of the Church, from whose caverns a stone of wondrous
lustre is taken »ow and then, to feed our faith, to reveal to

312 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

us the abundant though hidden operations of grace, and to
comfort us, when the world's wickedness and our own
depress us, by showing that God has pastures of His own
under our very feet, where His glory feeds without our seeing
it. So that, as sight goes for little in the world of faith,
in nothing does it go for less than in the seeming evil of the
world. Everywhere evil is undermined by good. It is only
that good is undermost ; and this is one of the supernatural
conditions of God's presence. As much evil as we see, so
much good, or more, do we know assuredly lies under it,
which, if not equal to the evil in extent, is far greater in
weight, and power, and worth, and substance. Evil makes
more show, and thus has a look of victory, while good is
daily outwitting evil by simulating defeat. "We must never
think of the Church without allowing largely for the extent
of obscure piety, the sphere of hidden souls. We can form
no intellectual judgment of the abundance of grace, of the
number of the saved, or of the inward beauty of individual
souls, which even intellectually is worth anything, unless
we form our estimate in the light of prayer. Charity is the
truest truth ; and the judgments of charity are large. The
light of our own unsanctified judgment is at best but as
moonlight in the world of faith, strangely distorting,
grotesquely disfiguring everything. The light of prayer is
as the beam of steadfast day. Who does not know how
sunshine positively peoples mountainside and wood, how, as
it rests, it builds homes we could dwell in, so our fancy
deems, in the rifted crags or under the leafy shades, how,
wherever it has touched, it has located a beauty, and has
left it when it passes on 1 So is it with the light of prayer
when it plays upon this difficult questionable world around
us. It alone lights up for us continually this incessant
heaven upon earth, this precious region of obscure souls, in
which God is always served as if it were one of the angelic

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 213

choira. Who does not remember when a supernatural prin-
ciple first unveiled itself before him, and showed that it was
a thing of Godt It was some one moment in a dawn of
prayer, which was like day's first inroad upon night. So
will it be with us to the end. Faith has a sort of vision of
its own ; but there is no light in which it can distinguish
objects, except the light of prayer.

We must always therefore keep our eye fixed on this
obscure world of holy hidden souls, that private unsuspected
stronghold of God's glory upon earth, where so much of His
treasure is laid up. Simeon and Anna are disclosures to us
of that hidden world. They have a place, an office, and a
power in the life of the Church, which is not the less indis-
pensable, because it it also indefinable. The Father's glory
would not have been adequately represented at the court of
the Infant Jesus, if this obscure region had not sent thither
its embassy of lowly beauty and of venerable grace.

Much of our most intimate acquaintance with the adorable
character of God arises from our observations of this hidden
world. It is the richest of all worlds in its contributions
to the science of divine things. If we may venture so to
speak, God is less upon His guard against our observations
there than elsewhere. He affects secrecy the less Himself,
because the particular world, in which He is working, is
itself so secret. He is content with the twilight round Him,
without pitching His well-known tent of darkness each time
He vouchsafes to camp. In the case of the Shepherds we
saw how they came up out of darkness, stood for a moment
in the splendour of Bethlehem, and then passed on into the
dark again. Here we see with Simeon and Anna what a
long preparation God makes in the soul for what appears
to be only a momentary manifestation. It shows of what
deep import a brief transient mystery is, when a novitiate
of perhaps fourscore years is barely long enough to fit those

114 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

for their part in it, who are after all but accessories and
incidents. If it be true to say that with God all ends are
only means, because He is Himself the only veritable End,
so also is it true in a sense that all means with Him are
ends, because He is present in those means. Thus these
long lives of preparation for one momentary appearance on
the stage of the world's drama are, when we view them
supernaturally, ends themselves, and each step of grace in
the long career, each link of holiness in the vast chain, is
itself a most sufficient end, because it holds in itself Him
who is the only end. But this is not the way men judge of
history. With them it is wandering humanity which is
made to confer the importance on the actors in the world's
theatre, and to confer it in proportion to the visible results
between the actors and humanity. With God it is His own
glory which is the hidden centre of all history, and it requires
a special study, with a strong habit of faith and a steady
light of prayer, to enable us to read history in His way.

But besides this long preparation for a momentary and
subordinate appearance in a divine mystery, we must observe
also how God often comes to men in their old age. They
have lived for that which only comes when real life seems
past. What a divine meaning there is in all this ! The
significance of a whole life often comes uppermost only in
the preparation for death. Our destiny only begins to be
fulfilled, after it appears to have been worked out. Who
knows what he is intended for 1 What we have dreamed
was our mission is of all things the least likely to have been
such. For missions are divine things, and therefore generally
hidden, generally unconsciously fulfilled. If there are some
who seem to have done their work early, and then live
on we know not why, there are far more who do their real
work late on, and not a few who only do it in the act of
dying. Nay is it not almost so in natural things? Life

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 215

for the most part blooms only once, and like the aloe it
blooms late.

Neither must we fail to note under what circumstances it
is God's habit to come to these hidden souls. The devotion
of Simeon and Anna is eminently a devotion of prayer and
church-frequenting. In other words God comes to holy
souls, not so much in heroic actions, which are rather the
soul's leaping upward to God, but in the performance of
ordinary, habitual devotions, and the discharge of modest,
unobtrusive duties, made heroic by long perseverance and
inward intensity. How much matter for thought is there
in all these reflections ; and in divine things what is matter
for thought is matter for practice also ! Thus, if the angelic
song was the opening of heaven before our eyes, this appari-
tion of Simeon and Anna is the opening beneath our feet of
an exquisite hidden world, a realm of subterranean angels,
a secret abyss of human hearts in which God loves to hide
Himself, a region of evening calmness and of twilight tran-
quillity, a world of rest and yet of power, heated with the
whole day's sunshine and giving forth its fragrance to the
cooling dews, a world, which not only teaches us much, but
consoles us also, yet leaves us pensive, (for does not consola-
tion always leave us so 1) casting over us a profitable spiritual
shadow, like the melancholy in which a beautiful sunset so
often steeps the mind, breeding more loving thoughts of
others, and in ourselves a more contented lowliness.

The lake lies smooth and motionless in the quiet light of
evening. The great mountains with their bosses of mottled
crag protruding through the green turf, and the islets with
their aerial pines, are all imaged downwards in the pellucid
waters. Even the heron that has just gone to roost on the
dead branch is mirrored there. The faintly rosy sky between
the tops of the many-fingered firs is reflected there, as if it
were fairy fretwork in the mere. But upon yon promontory

2i6 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS,

of rock a little blameless boy, afraid of the extreme tran-
quillity, or angry with it, or to satisfy some impulsive rest-
lessness within him, has thrown a stone into the lake, and
that fairy world, that delicate creation, is instantly broken
up and fled. So is it with that spiritual world of placid
beauty, which we have been contemplating in the worship
of Simeon and Anna.

Our next type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy drives
us with shout and cry from its pleasant melancholy, as if
we were trespassers in such a gentle world. Yet it is not
altogether a scene of unmingled violence which is coming.
But who does not know those plaintive sounds, sad in them-
selves but sadder in their circumstances, which can sometimes
extinguish even the shining of bright light, making one
sense master another, like the cry of the kpwing among
ruins ? So is it with us now. Like silent apparitions,
Simeon and Anna pass away. We hear loud voices and
shrill expostulations, as of women in misery talking all at
once, like a jargon in the summer woods when the birds
have risen against the hawk, and then the fearful cry of
excited lamentation, with the piteous moaning of the infant
victims mingled with the inconsolable wailing of their brave,
powerless mothers. It is the massacre of the Holy Innocents.
Yet even this dismal scene is a scene of worship. Tragic as
it is, it has a quiet side, and a beauty, which, blood-stained
though it be, is not unbecoming to the meek majesty of
Bethlehem. Alas ! how the anguish of those mothers, that
were so inconsiderate to her who was on the point of becom-
ing a mother like themselves, and how the wrathful but
more silent misery of the fathers, is expiating in its own
streets the inhospitality of Bethlehemu

But those little ones are mighty saints of God, and their
infant cries were a most articulate revelation of many of
His mysterious ways. The apparent contradiction that

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 217

innocence should do penance is one of the primary lawi
of the Incarnation. The Infant Saviour Himself began it.
It was involved in the state of humiliation in which He
came. It was part of the pathos of a fallen world. But
none shared it with Him at Bethlehem, except the Holy
Innocents. To Mary He brought a new access of heavenly
joy, and when the tender hand of Simeon was nerved by
the Holy Ghost to plant in her heart the first of the seven
swords she was to bear, it was the untimely woe of Calvary
that pierced her soul, and not the penances of Bethlehem.
To Joseph the joy the Infant brought was yet more
unmingled. The Baptist leaped with exultation in his
mother's womb, when the Babe came near. The Angels
sang because the mystery was full of jubilee. To the Shep-
herds it was good tidings of great joy, and to the Kings
contentment and delight. To Simeon and Anna also He
came as light, and peace, and satisfaction, and jubilee. His
brightness had made earth so dull, that all which was left
them now was speedily to die. But the Holy Innocents
joined their infant cries with His. To them the glad
Christmas and the singing Angels brought but blood and
death. They were the first martyrs of the Word, and
their guilt was His, — that they were bom in Bethlehem.

Renewing the miracle which He had wrought for John
the Baptist, our Lord is said to have conferred the full
use of reason, with immense and magnificent graces, on
these little ones at the moment of their martyrdom, so that
they might see Him in the clear splendour of their faith,
might voluntarily accept of death for His sake, and might
accompany their sacrifice by the loftiest acts of supernatural
holiness and heroism. The revelations of the saints also
tell us of the singular power now accorded in heaven to
these infant martyrs, especially in connection with death-
beds, and St Francis of Sales died reiterating with marked

2i8 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

emphasis and significance the invocation of the Holy Inno.
cents. They too were beautiful figures in the court of
Bethlehem. They were children like the Prince of Beth-
lehem Himself. They were His companions in nativity,
His mates in age and size; and though it was no slight
thing to have these natural alliances with Him, by grace
they were much more, for they were likenesses of Him, and
they were His martyrs. A twofold light shines in the faces
of this infant crowd, the light of Mary, and the light of
Jesus. They resembled Mary in their sinless purity ; for
even if our Lord had not constituted them in a state of
grace before, their original sin would be more than expiated
by their guileless blood, when it was shed for Him. It
was a fearful font, a most bloody sacrament, at which an
Infant like themselves held them as their god-father, that
they might lie in His paternal bosom for evermore. They
were like Mary in their martyrdom for Jesus, as all the
martyrs were; but they were like her also, in that their
martyrdom was as it were the act of Jesus Himself. He
was the sword which slew them. He was the proximate
cause of all they suffered. It is only more remotely so with
the other martyrs. This is one of their distinctions. They
resembled her also in their nearness to Jesus. They were
among the few who were admitted into the hierarchy of
the Incarnation. Their souls were amidst the attendants
who waited on His Human Soul when He rose on Easter
morning, and who ascended with Him into heaven. But
the light of Jesus also was in their faces. It was not only
in the material similitudes of being born when He was
born, and where He was born, that they were like Him.
They resembled Him with a most divine truthfulness, by
being bidden to counterfeit Him. Their mission was to
represent Him, to stand in His place, to bo supposed to
contain Him among themselves.

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. aig

Simeon and Anna lived long lives before they reached
their work, and it was laid gently at their doors at the
VCT> extremity of life. Their earthly work lay almost at
the threshold of heaven. The lot of the Innocents was the
reverse of this. They were just born, and their mission
was handed to them instantly and abruptly, and its fulfil-
ment was death. Yet in what a sense is it true of all of
us that we are but born to die ! Happy they who find the
great wisdom which lies in that little truth ! But there
was more than this in their likeness to our Lord. In one
way they outstripped Him. They died for Him as He died
for all. They paid Him back the life He laid down for
them. Nay, they were beforehand with Him, for they laid
down their lives for Him, before He laid His down for
them. They saved His life. They put ofi" His Calvary.
They secured to us His sweet parables. His glorious miracles,
and those abysses of His grown-up Passion, in which the
souls of the redeemed dwell in their proper element, like
fish within the deep. Yet, again, is there not a sense in
which we all pay our dear Lord back with our lives for
the life that He gave us ? What is a Christian life but
a lingering death, of which physical death is but the
last consummating act ; and if it be not all for Christ,
how is it a Christian life 1 Nevertheless in the historical
reality of all this lies the grand prerogative of the Holy
Innocents.

Notwithstanding their miraculous use of reason, they
are still types to us of that devotion so common among
the higher saints, the devotion of almost unconscious mor-
tification. They are like those who commit themselves to
God, and then take what is sure to come. They not only
commit themselves to Him without conditions, but they
do not count the cost, because to them His love is cheaply
bought at the price of all possible sacrifices. Hence there

220 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS,

is no cost to count. The truest mortification does not
forecast, because it is self-oblivious. Thus it was with
James and John, when they offered to drink our Saviour's
cup ; and how heroically they did drink it, when it came !
Thus it is that heroic mortification is so often taken by
surprise, and men, who cannot discern the saints aright,
think that the grandeur of their purpose for a moment
faltered, when all the while the surprise was only stirring
up deeper depths of grace, and meriting the more divinely.
These infant martyrs represent also what must in its
measure befall every one who draws near to Jesus. Suf-
fering goes out of Him, like an atmosphere. The air is
charged with the seed of crosses, and the soul is sown all
over with them before it is aware.

Moreover the cross is a quick growth, and can spring
up, and blossom, and bear fruit almost in a night, while
from its vivacious root a score of fresh crosses will spring
up and cover the soul with the peculiar verdure of Calvary.
They that come nearest to our Lord are those who sufl'er
most, and who sufi'er the most unselfishly. With His use
of reason He could have spoken and complained ; so might
the Innocents, but they worshipped only with their cries.
One moment they were made aware of the full value of their
dear lives, and the next moment they were of their own
accord to give them up, and not to let their newly given
reason plead, but even to hide it with the cries of unreason-
ing infancy. Never were martyrs placed under so peculiar a
trial How well they teach the old lesson, that unselfish-
ness is its own reward ; and that to hold our tongues about
our wrongs is to create a new fountain of happiness within
ourselves, which only needs the shade of secrecy to be
perennial ! If they paid dear for the honour of being the
fellow-townsmen of our Lord, how magnificent were the
graces, which none but He could have accumulated in thai

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 221

short moment, and which He gave to them with such a regal
plenitude ! To be near Jesus was the height of happiness,
yet it was also both a necessity and a privilege of suffering.
We cannot spare the Holy Innocents from the beautiful
world of Bethlehem. Next to Mary and Joseph, we could
take them away least of aU. Without them we should read
the riddle of the Incarnation wrong, by missing many of its
deepest laws. They are symbols to us of the necessities of
nearness to our Lord. They are the living laws of the
vicinity of Jesus. Softened through long ages, the Mother's
cries and the children's moans come to us almost as a sad
strain of music, sweeter than it is sad, sweet even because
it is so sad, the moving elegy of Bethlehem.

There is still another presence in the Cave of Bethlehem,
which is a type of devotion to the Sacred Infancy. Deep
withdrawn into the shade, so as to be scarcely visible, stands
one who is gazing on all the mysteries with holy amazement
and tenderest rapture. He takes no part in any of them.
His attitude is one of mute observance. He is like one of
those shadowy figures, which painters sometimes introduce
into their pictures, rather as suggesting something to the
beholder than as historically part of the action represented.
It is St Luke, the *' beloved physician " of St. Paul, and
the first Christian painter. He forms a type of worship by
himself, and must not be detached from the other eight,
though he was out of time with them. To us he is an
essential feature of Bethlehem. The Holy Ghost had elected
him to be the historiographer of the Sacred Infancy. With-
out him we should have known nothing of the Holy Child-
hood, except the startling visit of the three heathen Kings,
which was so deeply impressed on St. Matthew's Hebrew
imagination, together with the massacre of the Innocents
and the flight into Egypt, which were the consequences of
that visit, and so part of the one history. In the vision of

222 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

inspiration the Holy Ghost renewed to him the world of
Bethlehem, and the sweet spiritual pageantry of all ita
gentle mysteries. To him, the first artist of the Church, we
fitly owe the three songs of the Gospel, the Magnificat, the
Benedictus, and the Nunc dimittis. He was as much the
Evangelist of the Sacred Infancy, as St. John was the
Evangelist of the Word's Divinity, or St. Matthew and St.
Mark of the active life of our Blessed Lord.

He represents the devotion of artists, and the posture of
Christian art at the feet of the Incarnate Saviour. Christian
art, rightly considered, is at once a theology and a worship ;
a theology which has its own method of teaching, its own
ways of representation, its own devout discoveries, its own
varying opinions, all of which are beautiful so long as they
are in subordination to the mind of the Church. What is
the Blessed John of Fiesole's life of Christ, but, next to St.
Thomas, the most magnificent treatise on the Incarnation
which was ever conceived or composed *? No one can study
it without learning new truths each time. It gives up slowly
and by degrees to the loving eye the rich treasures of a
master-mind, full of depth, and tenderness, and truth, and
heavenly ideal It is a means of grace which sanctifies us as
we look upon it, and melts us into prayer.

Of a truth art is a revelation from heaven, and a mighty
power for God. It is a merciful disclosure to men of His
more hidden beauty. It brings out things in God which lie
too deep for words, things which words must needs make
heresies, if they try to speak them. In virtue of its heavenly
origin it has a special grace to purify men's souls, and to
unite them to God by first making them unearthly. If art
debased is the earthliest of things, true art, not unmindful
that it also, like our Lord, was born in Bethlehem, and
cradled with Him there, is an influence in the soul, so
heavenly that it almost seems akin to grace. It is a worship

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS. 223

too as well as a theology. From what abyss rose those
marvellous forms upon the eye of John of Fiesole, except
from the depths of prayer ? Have we not often seen the
divine Mother and her Blessed Child so depicted that it was
plain they never were the fruit of prayer, and do we not
instinctively condemn them even on the score of art, without
directly adverting to religious feeling 1 The temper of art is
a temper of adoration. Only a humble man can paint divine
things grandly. His types are delicate and easily missed,
shifting under the least pressure and bending unless handled
softly. An artist, who is not joined to God, may work
wonders of genius with his pencil and colours ; but the
heavenly spirit, the essence of Christian art, will have
evaporated from his work It may remain to future genera-
tions as a trophy of anatomy, and a triumph of peculiar
colouring; but it will not remain as a source of holiest
inspiration to Christian minds, and an ever-flowing fountain
of the glory of God. It may be admired in the gallery ; it
would offend over the altar. Theology and devotion both
owe a heavy debt to art, but it is as parents owe debts to
their loving children. They take as gifts what came from
themselves, and they love to consider that what is due to
them by justice is rather paid to them out of the spontaneous
generosity of love. St. Luke is the type and symbol of this
true art, which is the child of devotion and theology ; and it
is significant that he is thus connected with the world of
Bethlehem.

The characteristics, which have been noticed in his Gospel,
seem to be most congenial to his vocation. Our Lord's life
is everywhere the representation of the beautiful ; but in
none of its mysteries is it a more copious fountain of art
than in those of His Sacred Infancy ; and it is these which
inspiration has especially loved to disclose to St. Luke's pre-
(Jilection. A painter is a poet also, and hence his Gospel is

824 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS,

the treasury in which the Christian canticles, all of them
canticles of the Sacred Infancy, are laid up and embalmed
for the delight and consolation of all time. The preservation
of them was a natural instinct of an artistic mind, which was
already fitted to receive a bidding of inspi.-ation so congenial
to itself. He was a physician as well as a painter, and there
is something kindred in the spirit of the two occupations.
The quick eye, the observant gentleness, the appreciation of
character, the seizing of the actual circumstances, the genial
spirit, the minute attentiveness, the sympathising heart, the
impressionableness to all that is soft, and winning, and
lovely, and weak, and piteous, all these things belong to the
true physician as well as to the true artist. Hence has it
come to pass that the physician of the body has so often been
the physician of the soul as well. That which is truly
artistic in him makes him a kind of priest ; and what above
all things are priests, artists, and physicians, but angelic
ministers to human sorrow, ministers of love and not of fear,
vested with a pathetic office of consolation, which, strange to
say, seems the more tender and unselfish because it is official.
Thus St. Luke is noted for his instinct for souls. His
Gospel has been named the Gospel of mercy, because it is so
full of incidents of our Lord's love of sinners. It is from
him chiefly that we have the conversions of sinners, and the
examples of our Lord's amazing kindness to them, or we
may say rather of His positive attraction to them, like the
physician's attraction to the sick, to use the figure which He
Himself vouchsafed to use in order to justify Himself for this
compassionate propensity. After Mary, Luke is the beginner
of the devotion to the Precious Blood, whose apparently
indiscriminate abundance and instantaneous absolving power
he so artfully magnifies in his beautiful Gospel.* It is a

* This does not contradict the Sixth Chapter of my Treatise on the
Precious Blood, where (p. 291) St. Paul is called the *' doctor of tha

THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS, 225

Gospel of sunshine. It throws strong light into the darkest
places, and loves to use the power it has to do so : and is
not all this painter-like ? The examples, to which the fallen
sinner turns instinctively when hope and despair are battling
for his soul, are mostly in the Gospel of St. Luke. He chose
what he most loved himself ; and inspiration ministered to
the bent of his genius, rather than diverted or ignored it.
He is known, like all artists, by his choice of subjects. What
wonder he was the dear companion of St. Paul, when their
minds were so congenial ! The magnifying of grace, the
facility and abundance of redemption, the vast treasures of
hope, the delight of reconciliation with God, the predilection
for the grand phenomena of conversion, all these peculiarities
of St Luke's genius would recommend him to the apostle of
the Precious Blood, and would also give him swift admission
to the intimacy of Mary.

It was perhaps through her that the Holy Ghost revealed
to him the mysteries of Bethlehem. To John she spake of
the Eternal Generation of the Word, to Luke of Nazareth
and Bethlehem, of the Angels and the Shepherds, and the
Gospel Songs. For devotion to ^Mary is an inalienable
inspiration of Christian art, and it is akin also to devotion
to the Babe of Bethlehem. Luke with the painter's license
gazed into Mary's face as none other, but the Infant Jesus,
had ever gazed into it. He read the mysteries of Bethlehem
depicted there. He drank the spirit of the Sacred Infancy
in the fountains of her eyes. He lived with the Mother of
Mercy, until he saw nothing but mercy in her Son. The
image in his heart, which was the model of all other images,
was the countenance of the divine Mother. His idea of Jesus
was His marvellous likeness to Mary, likeness, not in features
only, but in ofl&ce and in soul. Thus was the spirit of beauty

Precious Blood ; " for St. Luke'g Gospel is said to have beeu written under
the eye of St. Paul.

226 THE FIRST WORSHIPPERS.

within him instinctively drawn to Bethlehem, just as Beth-
lehem has been the most queenly attraction of holy art ever
since. Then, when he comes to our Lord's public life and
Ilis intercourse with men, it is just such manifestations of
His Sacred Heart, as are the most congenial to the spirit of
the Sacred Infancy, which his predilection chooses for his
written portrait of the Incarnate Word, Let us place him
then in the Cave of Bethlehem, withdrawn into the shadow,
and looking out from thence with the boldness of his tender
eyes upon the mysteries around Him. He is there by the
appointment of the Holy Ghost, as the painter of Mary, and
the secretary of the Infant Jesus.

Such were the first worshippers of Bethlehem, nine types
of devotion showed to us there, full of spiritual loveliness
and attraction : nine separate seas that image heaven in their
own way, or form all together one harmonious ocean of
worship of the Incarnate Word. We may join ourselves,
first to one, and then to another, of these nine choirs of first
worshippers, and adore the Incarnate Word. How wonderful
is the variety of devotion, more endless than the variations
of light and shade, or the ever-shifting processions of the
graceful clouds, or the never twice-repeated tracery of the
forest architecture, as endless apparently as the excellences
of Him who is the centre of all devotion ! We may venture,
not uninvited, into that dear sanctuary of Bethlehem, and be
as heart to Mary or as thought to Joseph, as voice to John
or as harps to the Angels, as sheep to the Shepherds or as
incense to the Kings, as sweet sights to Simeon and to
Anna, or as soft sighs to the Holy Innocents, or as a pen
for Luke to write with, and to write of the Babe of Bethlehem.
Is it not a beautiful sea of tranquillest devotion, with the
spirit of Bethlehem settling down over the purple of its
waters, like one of those silent sunsets which are so beautiful
that it seems as if they ought to make music in the air ?

t 227 )

CHAPTER V.

TUE INFANT GOD.

There is no poem in the world like a man's life, the life of
any man, however little it may be marked with what we
call adventure. For real life, even the most commonplace,
is strong-featured, if we look at it attentively. No poet
would so dare to mingle sweetness and strangeness, simplicity
and peculiarity, sublimity and pathos, as real life mingles
them together. The characters of the poet either stand out
from the common lot of men as exceptional cases, or else
lose distinguishable individuality altogether. But a man's
real life is at once a bolder and a simpler thing than the
creation of the poet. It is like a grand heavenly recitative,
which providence itself pronounces as the years go on with
a sort of eloquent dramatic silence, from one point of view
inventive as the impro visa tore, from another merely inter-
preting the waywardness of a man's own will.

True however it is, that the very barrenest life of man
that ever was lived is, if we take the inward and the out-
ward together, a truly divine poem, to which he who listens
becomes wise. Each single human life in the world amounts
to nothing less than a private revelation of God, a revelation
which would be enough for the whole world, if an inspired
pen recorded it. But, when a man is living in a state of
grace, and is giving himself up to God and leading an interior
life, then his secret biographv Locomcs still more wonderful,

328 THE INFANT GOD.

because it is more consciously supernatural Most inward-
living men have some special attraction of grace, some divine
mould in which their spiritual lives are cast, a mould which
God uses, not for classes, but for individuals. Each man
stands in a relation to God which is peculiar to himself.
He shares it with no other man. He has had more graces
or fewer, larger or smaller, of a different character, and blend-
ing differently with the varying circumstances of his outward
life. These external circumstances are never the same to
any two men, as far as we can see. The alternations of
bright and dark are differently distributed to each, so that
each outward life forms a different amalgamation with grace
from any other outward life. The very geography of a
man's life changes his grace. If God allows the angels to
behold the multiform lives of men in a clear light from His
point of view, the world must be to them almost like a second
beatific vision ; such a glorious and bold revelation must it
be to them of the inaccessible character of the Creator.

A spiritual man may be defined to be one who has received
a second life from God, a life which lie lives privately with
God, and which is itself a kind of divine law to his outward
life, standing in the relation of supremacy to it, and at the
same time leaving free play to circumstances. This second
life is heavenly. Its vitality is from heaven. Its powers
are heavenly. It is conversant with heavenly things, and
deals with earthly things only to transmute them into
heavenly things by the alchemy of grace. In nothing is
this individual attraction of grace more observable than in
a man's devotions ; and, because of the relation in which
devotion stands to virtue, in nothing is it more important.
With some men it is the same all through life ; with others
it changes with the seasons and circumstances of life. Some-
times a man sees it plainly himself ; at other times others
can see it, while it remains invisible to himself ; sometimes

THE INFANT GOD. 229

it is hidden altogether, yet not necessarily absent because it
is hidden. In some souls it is so strong that it moulds their
entire life; with others it is so weak that their devotion
seems to have no rule beyond that seemingly external rule,
which is more mysterious and excellent than men believe,
the calendar of the Church.

Some men, for instance, have a sovereign attraction to the
mysteries of the Incarnation, but without a special drawing
to any one of them. Some are drawn to portions of oui
Lord's life, as the Infancy, the Passion, or the Ministry,
while others fix upon some one of the subordinate mysteries,
contained in one of those portions, as St. Charles Borromeo
fixed upon the Agony in the Garden, and worked that one
mystery out in the grandeur of his heroic life. The spiritual
life of some is more at home in the mysteries of the Incarna-
tion as expressed in ^lary, than in the same mysteries as
expressed by Jesus, or rather it is their bent to find Jesus
in Mary, where more or less all must find Him who love our
Lord's own ways and follow His divine leading. The devo-
tion of some is to the Sacraments, and thereby they reach
an amazing, and very distinctive, fc\inctity. Some have their
spiritual hearing so haunted, that all life long they hear the
souls in purgatory for ever bleating in their ears, like the
strayed lambs crying aloud far up among the stony moun-
tains. The devotion of some is fed by the pageants and
functions of the Church, while other souls fare better in a
quiet catacomb, with St. Philip, or on the hill-top, with St.
John of the Cross, or under the nightly canopy of stars,
with St. Ignatius.

But there is one devotion in particular, with which we
are at present concerned, devotion to the Attributes of God.
All believers worship God, and therefore all believers wor-
ship those divine perfections which we conceive to exist in
Him in some supereminent way. But a special devotion to

230 THE INFANT GOD.

the Divine Perfections is sometliing in addition to this
worship. All Christians worship our Blessed Lord as God
and Man ; yet some have a special devotion to Him in the
Blessed Sacrament, some in His Infancy, others in His
Passion, while the devotion of others is to the Incarnation
in general Thus it is with devotion to the Attributes of
God. Some are altogether without this devotion, the absence
of which in no way impairs their worship of God. But just
as some devout souls live in the Passion, without any more
special attraction towards the Infancy than is implied by
holding the faith, so some souls live among the Attributes
of God by a sort of daring predilection, and this dwelling-
place of their devotion is to them what Calvary, or Bethlehem,
or the Tabernacle, are to others. Some also have a special
attraction to one Attribute rather than to the rest. Sister
Benigne Gojos was drawn especially to honour the divine
Justice, Father Condren the divine Sanctity, and Lancisius
mentions a Spanish lady whose peculiar devotion was to the
divine Patience. We know that there can in reality be no
such things as separate Attributes in God, because He is a
Simple Act, and is therefore His own Attributes. But these
perfections are the ways in which He invites us to regard
Him.* They are different sides of His character, different

* It is certain that the Divine Attributes are not really distinguished
from the Divine Essence, nor among themselves. The Scotists teach
that the Attributes are distinguished from the Essence and among them-
selves by a sort of distinction, diflBcult to define, but which ii midway
between a real distinction and a simple distinction of reaaon. The
Nominalists occupy the other extreme, and teach that there is not even
a distinction of reason between them. The Thomists teach that they
are distinguished, but merely by a distinction of reason. See Lexana,
Dt AUributia Dei. Tract. 2. Disp. a. The theological student may be
referred to the question in Theology, An distingui possint Attributa in
Deo sine respectu ad creaturas. Amicus, Dt Essentia DH, Disp. iii. sect.
vi,, and also the other question, Utrum Attributa dirina sint multi-
tudine infinita, aut certo aliquo numero comprehenaa. Izquierdo. Dt
Deo Uno, Tract i. Disp. 2. qusHst. 8.

THE INFANT GOD. i3l

aspects of His majesty, and therefore appeal differently to
our souls, and appear to work different works of grace within
us. Hence it is that they become the subjects of a special
devotion, or of several special devotions.

But this devotion to the Attributes of God stands in a
very particular relation to devotions to the Incarnation. If
we were to suppose that devotion to the Incarnation was one
kind of devotion to God, and devotion to the Divine Attri-
butes another, and that we were free to pass the one by, and
to adopt the other, we should fall into the most deadly error
which could beset the spiritual life. Our Lord is the ap-
pointed way to God. The Incarnation lies all round Him,
and faith has no access to the Throne except over that region,
whether they who traverse it have explicit knowledge of its
true significance or not. Neither again is devotion to the
Incarnation a stage through which we can pass, and then
have done with it. It is no scaffolding whereby we mount
to the higher devotions to the Divine Attributes or the Holy
Trinity, which may be dispensed with when the contem-
plative soul has climbed those fortunate heights. For our
Incarnate Lord is the life as well as the way. We cannot
dispense with His Sacred Humanity either in time or in
eternity. It is our abiding life. Neither, last of all, can
we separate devotion to the Divine Attributes from devotion
to the Incarnation ; for our Lord, once more, is the truth as
well as the way and the life ; and the truth is one and indi-
visible. "We cannot sunder what God has joined. It is
just those souls, who have laid the strongest hold upon the
mysteries of the Incarnation, that are most likely to be
distinguished for special devotion to the Attributes of God.
When the Blessed Paul of the Cross fixed the Passion and
the Attributes of God as the two subjects of meditation for
his order of nuns, he implied that there was in mystical
theology an occult connection between the two devotiona

232 THE INFANT GOD.

So in like manner our reading of the lives of the saints must
often have brought before us the fact that souls, immersed in
the spirit of the Sacred Infancy, seem to imbibe a special
fitness for an eagle-like contemplation of the fastnesses of
the Divine Nature. The infantine simplicity of soul, which
comes from Bethlehem, claims kindred with that heavenly
sublimity of spirit, which hovers almost unalarmed around
the mountain-tops of God. Thus, to express shortly what
seems to contain the chief truth of the matter, there are
some souls whose chief devotion to the Incarnation consists
in a devotion to our Lord's Divinity in each and all of His
mysteries, or in some particular favourite mysteries. It is
thus through the Incarnation that they approach the Divine
Perfections, and in the Divine Perfections that they most
realise the inexpressible sweetness of the Incarnation.

Any special drawing in devotion is a great gift from God.
It is one of the most powerful of all the secret influences of
the spiritual life. It is therefore of great importance to a
man not to mistake or overlook such a heavenly attraction.
Such a mistake is like a man's missing his vocation. Every
man doubtless has a vocation, so every spiritual man has a
devotional attraction, or a succession of them. For a spiritual
man is one who dwells inwardly in the supernatural world,
amid God's mysteries and revealed grandeurs. He is not a
mere tourist who is struck by the sublime or the picturesque
of theology, and admires the scenery as a whole, and has not
such a familiarity with it as to enable him to break it up
into separate landscapes, nor time to brood tranquilly over
any of them so as to have a rational predilection for them.
He dwells in the world of theology. He is like one whose
fixed abode is in grand scenery. He sees it in the morning
light and in the sunset's glow. He knows how it looks
when the misty calm of summer noon is wafting fragrance
over wood and water. He is familiar with it in the vicissi-

THE INFANT GOD. 23^^

tudes of storm aud calm. WTien the distant mountains are
hidden by summer's impenetrable rampart of green leaves
before his window, he feels that they are there, and that
winter's leafless woods will let them in upon his sight. He
knows how the faces of the mountains change, according as
the light strikes them in the front or from behind, and how
a stranger, who has seen them in the morning, would in the
evening, spite of all landmarks, be doubtful of their identity.
He cannot help having preferences. Predilections are almost
a necessity to him. Or at least he must honour, like
a true poet, each coming season with an admiration which
seems, if it only seems, to do injustice to the season that is
past, like the souls who in devotion follow the Calendar of
the Church, and honour most the feast under whose shadow
they are sitting. So it must be to those to whom the super-
natural world is a genuine home. Their life is a life of
loves, and therefore of predilections also.

All spiritual souls are thus haunted souls. They see sights
which others do not see, and hear sounds which others do
not hear. This haunting is to them their own secret prophecy
of heaven. It would be sad to miss so choice a grace by
inattention, sadder still to follow a fantastic delusion of
earth instead of the heavenly reality. The soul cannot hear
God unless it listens for Him, and listening is the devoutest
attitude of a wise and loving soul. Yet they who listen
hear many sounds which others do not hear, many sounds
for which they themselves are never listening. There are
false sounds on earth, which have a trick of heaven in them.
They are like the phantom- bells that ring for vespers, as
from viewless convents, in the wilderness of Zin. Yet the
Bedouin deems that, with his practised ear, he cbb discern
their thin toiling from the real sounds of the sandy solitude.
The avoiding of delusion is not the whole of safety in the
spiritual life. "When a man turns his entire life into a

234 THE INFANT GOD.

cautious self-defence against imposture, he is leading perhaps
the falsest life a man can lead. There is more danger in
missing a grace from God, than in mistaking an earthly
beckoning for a divine. For in the last case purity of inten-
tion soon rectifies the error, while in the other the loss is
for the most part irretrievable. Even in the natural life,
and in the spiritual life much more, they are the most un-
fortunate of men, who linger behind their lot. They are
like those who loiter behind the desert caravan. Straight-
way, as Marco Polo tells us, a shadowy voice calls them by
their name, and allures them to one side of the route.
They follow, and still it calls, and when they have wandered
from the path, a mocking silence follows, more terrible than
the deceiving voice. The wind of evening has lifted the
light sands, and quietly effaced the marks of feet and camel-
hoofs upon the wilderness, as the breeze ruffles out the wakes
of ships on the yielding deep, and smooths the water by its
ruffling. They have missed their vocation. It is no use
their living now. They might as well lie down and die.
Such are they, who in the spiritual life linger behind their
grace. They of all men are the most haunted by delusions,
and have the least discernment by which to tell them from
realities. A soul that has let grace outstrip it, will never
see its caravan again. It may die with God ; for God is in
the wilderness ; but faint indeed is the chance of its not
dying in the wilderness. Let each man look well to see if
he has not within himself a leading from God ; and if he
has, let him know that it is his one saving thing to follow it.
In the kingdom of grace, the law, which has the fewest
exceptions, is the one which rules that supernatural things
shall graft themselves on natural stocks. Hence it is that a
man's devotional attraction is for the most part congenial to
his natural turn of mind. Now it is with spiritual men as
it ifl with poets. Some delight in quiet, modest scenes in

THE INFANT GOD. 23c

woodland bowers, in tinkling brooks, in rivers that lapse so
quietly with their brims on the level of the meadows that
the sedge scarce twinkles in the stream, in cottages jasmine-
mantled, in kine knee-deep in the cool shallow, in village
spires scarce over-topping a coronal of ancient elms, in the
fragrance of the bee-laden limes, and in all those evening
sights and sounds which tell of weary labour set free and
wending to its home, which is an allegory that bears a
thousand gentle interpretations. Others delight in the misty
plain, in the forest solitude, in the distant horizon of the
steppe, in the solemnity of the overclouded fen, in vast out-
spread scenes of moonlit sea, or in the silence of deserted
cities and neglected ruins. These are the images which
recur in their works again and again, as if those aspects of
nature were the entire expressions of their minds. There
are some whose imagery is all from the tangled lives of men,
and the many-sided aspects of human actions, poets who
have no still life within their souls, except when they reach
the intensest depths of passions, which at such depths are
gestureless and mute. They can clothe in marvellous beauty
the objects whose daily commonness most dishonours them.
The streets of the city become beautiful in their word-
pictures, and the trampling of a multitude makes music in
their verse, while the familiar thoughts and things of their
own day impart a livingness to their souls, full of nerve and
of significance, yet dignified and beautified by the excellence
of their art.

There are others who like to live in echoing thunderstorms,
among the rifted crags of the hollow mountains, who go far
out of the sound of suffering humanity, and are dwellers
with the eagles. The stun of the thundering avalanche, the
black, mountainous, and shipless seas bursting on the iron-
bound coast, the cloud-pageantry of magnificently appalling
storms, the sobbing and moaning of the winds in purple

236 THE INFANT GOD.

unsunny glens, the overwhelming silence of the central
desert, the creaking of the huge cordillera as the earthquake
stretches its stiff limbs upon the rack, the unwitnessed
volcanoes that wave their red torches over the silent ghastly
whiteness of the creatureless south pole, as if they were earth's
fiery banners hung out in space as she races onward, the
terrific regions of tumultuous mountain tops with misty
breaks between the ridges where humble sequestered vales
might be, shapeless waving forms and throbbing silences
shadows in the gigantic gloom of unsunny caves, immense
precipices that sleep for ever in shadows of their own even
when the brightest sun is shining, — these are images, ex-
pressed or unexpressed, which overcast the works of such
miuds, and are their genius, their inspiration, their native
grandeur. It is in a world of these dread forms that their
minds breathe most freely, or rather they breathe freely
nowhere else but there. It is to these last that we may
compare the souls, whose attraction in the spiritual life is to
the Divine Perfections. Majestic deserts as they are to the
bounded intelligence of man, yet some souls find better
nurture there than in the verdant pastures lower down. The
eagle chooses his dwelling with as faultless an instinct as the
nightingale deep hidden in its bush, or the robin trilling its
winter song upon the window-sill. "We must not call such
souls ambitious. They have been lured thither by wiles of
grace as gentle and as gradual, as those who have been drawn
to the crib of Bethlehem. They are humble, and therefore
they are not deluded. Is it not the men of the loftiest
conceptions w^ho for the most part have the humblest
minds 1

It is to such souls that this chapter is specially, though
by no means exclusively, addressed.* The deepest and

* The same subject has been treated iu the last Chapter of my Treatiw
OD " The Precious Blood.'

THE INFANT GOD. 237

most profitable devotion to the Incarnation is that which
never loses sight for a single moment of our Blessed Lord's
Divinity ; and the richest as well as the safest devotion to
the Divine Perfections is that which contemplates them in
connection with the mysteries of the Incarnation. Our
present object therefore is to furnish the materials for such
devotion in especial connection with the mysteries of the
Sacred Infancy, though for a while we must seem to be
going away far from them.

There are almost as many points of view from which we
may contemplate the Attributes of God, as there are indi-
vidual souls in the Church. Yet there is a similarity of
method even amongst these differences. Some fix their
attentions and affection on the Attributes which assert all
possible positive perfection, beauty, and goodness of the
Most High ; and it is plain that* the height of this devotion
will depend very much upon the height of our own concep-
tions, although the practice of it will infallibly elevate and
ennoble those conceptions in the end. Others on the contrary
magnify God by their negations. In other words, they fix
their loving and admiring look on those Attributes, which
deny of Him all such imperfection, limitati(m, partial posses-
sion, and mixed sovereignty, as seem to us essential to every-
thing else in the world but God. On the whole, there is
more truth to be attained, a nearer approach to a worthy idea
of God by this negative method than by the positive ; for it
leaves us what the positive runs the risk of not leaving us,
that vague and indefinite magnificence which must cling to
our idea of God when we have done our utmost to compre-
hend Him. There are others again who use these negations
as if they were rather affirmations, that is, as affirming of
God an excellence, not in the limited degree or imperfect
kind in which possible creatures may possess it, but in a
supereminent, supers ubstantial, supcressential manner, to use

238 THE INFANT GOD.

their own style of speaking. But this method will be found
in reality to be nothing more than a union of the other two.
At one time devotion will fix itself on God as He is visible
in His w^orks. Some souls will remain all their lives long
chiefly conversant with those Attributes which shine forth
most manifestly in the mysteries of Creation and Redemp-
tion ; and other souls will remain for weeks, months, or
even years in this contemplation. There are some again
whose love allures them rather to lose themselves in the
glad thoughts of that inward life which God is leading, and
ever has been leading, in His own Blessed and sufficient
Self. To some the Divine Attributes lie always in the light
of the Most Holy Trinity, and they can read God best by
the splendour cast upon Him by the Eternal Generation of
the Son or the Unbeginning Procession of the Spirit. To
others again the treasures of the Godhead are unlocked by a
series of shocks or sweet surprises, as is the case when we
allow the mystery of the Incarnation to unfold for us the
hidden recesses^bf the Godhead.

Thus the littleness of the Babe of Bethlehem, touched in
our hearts by the faith in His Divinity, sends us by a kind
of impulse far into the understanding of His infinity. The
shame of Calvary lets us deeper down into His essential
glory, than we should else have had the momentum to
penetrate ; for the abysses of God are waters in which it is
hard for nature to sink. Of itself it only floats like drift-
wood on the surface. Tlie thirst and fatigue of Jesus at the
well of Jacob throw a light around Him as Creator, which has
a startling clearness, and compels an instantaneous worship
of speechless tears. This is the characteristic of devotion to
the Divine Perfections through the Incarnation, that it
impels us by these shocks deeper into the hiding-places of
the Immense Majesty than we should otherwise have been
able to go. It is then of this last sort of devotion to the

THE INFANT GOD. 239

Attributes of God that we shall have chiefly to speak in
this Chapter. We must however bear in mind that the
more excellent our devotion to these Attributes becomes,
also the more vague, indefinite, obscure and shadowy be-
comes our view of God's sublimity.

It is not with this devotion as with some others. Here
we always purchase clearness at the expense of height and
depth and breadth. We contract the dimensions of God
and diminish Him, nay not seldom we must also reverse His
image, in order to see Him clearly. Hence therefore this
devotion, to become a devotion of predilection, implies in
the soul abundant gifts of faith and of tranquillity, two
graces so congenial that they seldom lie far apart. We
must have a great gift of faith, because then we feel the less
painfully poor nature's hungry gnawings to see and to under-
stand. We must also possess tranquillity of spirit, dove-like
brooding souls, else the vast outspread magnificence will
only wink before us like lightning, showing nothing when
it lightens, but only dazzling us with its after-darknesses.
We shall discern nothing in it. We shall never accustom our-
selves to it as a light to read by. We shall see it double,
or divided, or restless, or coloured, by straining at it un-
quietly.

A soul truly versed in this devotion to the Divine Perfec-
tions is one who has learned to see in divine darkness, in a
holy night, better than in terrestrial day, and to whom the
indefinite has become more defined than the definite. Dis-
tance is necessary to vision. A man, whose spiritual life
is in this glorious devotion, is one who, like many men
physically, sees things far ofi" better than things which are
near, and who has removed God further off from him by the
magnificence of his conceptions of Ilim, rather than brought
Him nearer by the familiarity of His contemplation, and
who now sees Him better in the imweusity of that distance,

240 THE INFANT GOD.

and in the confusion of that light, in which to unpractised
eyes He is simply invisible altogether. He, who looks with
quiet patience into any unoccupied spot of blue in the mid-
night heavens, will soon people it for himself with stars.
So are they who look for God.

Now it is a characteristic of devotion to the Divine
Perfections through the Incarnation, that the Incarnation
supplies us with a number of legitimate and not delusive
images, and even with measures of distance, which as it
were bring the infinite within our compass by breaking it
up into many infinities. Yet it is at the same time charac-
teristic of such a devotion, that these images and measures
of distance, being themselves divine things, do not in any
way impair that vagueness, indefiniteness, and obscurity,
which are absolutely essential to true ideas about God. This
is another of its recommendations. We have seen already
how by its shocks and surprises it enables us to penetrate
further into each of the Divine Attributes, than we should
otherwise have done. We now see also that it brings this
sublime devotion to God's Perfections within the reach of
many more souls, than could otherwise have practised it,
inasmuch as they could not have existed without the nutri-
ment of images, or without the resting-places of those
measures of distance, which the union of our Lord's Human
Nature with His Divine supplies to us in every mystery,
and back to which we can always retreat without in reality
losing any ground we may have gained. The entire world
of devotion to the Incarnation has perhaps never yet been
explored. Almost every age of the Church develops some
new treasures in it, discovers gold in unsuspected places,
and even widens the horizon so as to enlarge the view.
Perhaps the least of divine mysteries must of necessity be
unfathomable, simply because it is divine. This much at
any rate may be said, that no one has gained even a compara-

THE INFANT GOD. 241

tive perfection in his devotion to the Incarnation, who has
not applied it to the purposes of discovery in God, of
observations on His Attributes, of anticipations of that
Blissful Vision in which eternal life consists.

But, while out of the seven methods * of devotion to the
Divine Attributes, enumerated above, we cou})le the last
with the Incarnation in a special manner, we must not
suppose that the other six are in reality independent of that
life-giving and God-revealing mystery, or can be detached
from it. All that can be said is that it is less prominent in
them. Let us then begin by occupying ourselves with a
method of using all these six methods either separately or
collectively, which will be found exceedingly congenial to
the mystery of the Incarnation, and, if original in form,
guilty, we may hope, of no other originality. It is this.
God is especially Life. The Life of God is His blessedness.
It is Himself. To have life in Himself is the unshared
prerogative of God. The Son drew it eternally from the
Father's fountain. The Holy Ghost rejoiced in the eternal
possession of it from the one fountain of the father and the
Son. Not 80 much as a shadow of this excellence rests
upon any created thing or person. It is a height in God
too high to cast any shade over creation which lies in its
littleness close under His feet. From the more or less
unconscious feeling of this characteristic of Life in God's
incommunicable grandeur it has come to pass, that it is not
an uncommon form for devotion to the Incarnation to adopt,

* They may be thug named, i. The Affirmative Method. 2. The
Negative Method. 3. The combination of the two. 4. Through the
medium of the phenomena of Creation and the Doctrines of Redemption.
This fourth method might technically be divided into two, but never is
so in fact. 5. Through Conceptions of the Inward Life of God. 6. Through
a special devotion to the Mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. 7. In con-
nection with some Mystery or Set of Mysteries of the Incarnation. The
Method, which is diffidently proposed in the text, may be considered a»
an eighth.

Q

242 THE INFANT GOD,

that of throwing itself upon the various lives which oui
Lord is supposed to have lived.

When we cast the mysteries of the Incarnation together
into great groups and masses, we make His Life threefold,
Joyful, Suffering, and Glorious. The most complete form
is that which distinguishes eight lives in Him, His Unborn
Life, Infant Life, Hidden Life, Public Life, Suffering Life,
Risen Life, Ascended Life, and Sacramental Life. Into
these moulds devotion to the Incarnation pours itself, and
comes out in forms and shapes of the most surpassing beauty.
Some of us get so used to these life-moulds, that we transfer
them to our devotion to the Attributes of God, and, besides
their facility from habit, we find many unexpected con-
veniences and congruities in them of exceeding value, whilst
they not only help to keep the Incarnation continually before
us, but lead us to find our actual devotion to the Divine
Perfections in the depths of the Incarnation, thus landing
us, though starting from different points, at the seventh
method of devotion to the Divine Attributes of which we
have already spoken. It is difficult to make this clear to
any one who has not practised it, while to one who has, it
has already made itself so plain that it does not need an
explanation.

There are two peculiar advantages of this method of
devotion to the Perfections of God. The first is, that it
does not confine us in any single contemplation to the use
of only one of the seven methods enumerated above. We
can use them aU separately or collectively. We may pass
from one to the other with the rapidity of thought, playing
upon them as musicians play upon the keys, or we may glance
at them in their unity and completeness. We may weave,
unweave, interweave, our thoughts of them as we please, at
once gaining variety for our contemplation without any damage
to its simplicity, and also emancipating ourselves from the

THE INFANT GOD. 243

trammels of too much formality and legislation, which are
less applicable to this devotion than to any other, and which
most men have already outlived when they have reached
this stage in the cycle of prayer, outlived at least so far as
the amount of it is concerned which once was needful, and
so far as the minute subjection to it is concerned, which, at
the outset of prayer, is often the best part of the prayer itself
as well as of the systematic legislation.

The other advantage is that its forms singularly fall in
with and minister to correct theology, in a manner which
turns out to be of no slight consequence as we advance in
devotion to the Divine Attributes. We look at God as
living so many different lives, though there is neither time,
space, succession, or mutation in Him. When we are think-
ing of one of His lives, or, to describe the process more
accurately, gazing at it, we put aside altogether the other
countless lives which He is at that eternally present moment
contemporaneously living. It is not that we forget them ;
for they are always lying half consciously in the back- ground,
and influencing us by keeping us indefinite, which is what
we require. But we purposely put them aside, and look at
that life of God as if it was His whole life, that is, as if it
were God Himself. Thus by degrees we get well into our-
selves as our standing idea of God that He is what He is,
that He is the infinite things which He is, that His Perfec-
tions are not perfections of His, but are Himself. To say
of God that "He has" is to be thinking of creation and
outward things : to say of God that " He is " is to be think-
ing of Himself. Thus the Simplicity of God comes to be
the foundation of all our devotions to His Attributes from
the beginning, and not merely the ultimate idea reached, and
often uneasily as well as imperfectly reached, after many
trials and failures, imperfectly, that is, even with reference
to our capabilities of reaching so sovereign an idea.

244 THE INFANT GOD,

When we are contemplating our Blessed Lord's Public
Life, we do not advert to His Infant Life. The one idea
would interfere with the other, unless we were purposely
passing from one to the other in order to bring out contrasts
or similitudes. When we are with Him on Calvary, we
know that Easter lies in front of us ready to dawn, but we
shut ourselves up purposely lest some streak of that dawn
should surprise us, and we gaze upon our Lord in His depths
of agony, as if they were His whole mission, as if He had
always been there and always would be there, as if all His
mysteries were states and permanences, which in a very high
sense they are. Our prayer would be speculation or contro-
versy, rather than meditation, if we dealt otherwise with it.
So do we deal with these lives of God, which we put before
ourselves as the objects of our contemplation. Moreover that
which lies at the bottom of all the eight lives of Jesus, not
only giving them their unity, but also the vitality, signifi-
cance, and tenderness by which tliey elicit and exercise our
devotion, is our faith in His Divinity, which is always work-
ing indistinctly in the mysteries of the Incarnation, even when
we perceive it least, or are even wilfully prescinding from
it. His Divinity, the Divinity of the Word, occupies the
•ame position with regard to all these eight various lives,
which the Simplicity of the Divine Nature occupies with
regard to the perhaps eighteen lives in which our prayer
may be used to look at God. So that, from the point of
view of this peculiar method, here advocated, the analogies
between the devotion to the Divine Attributes and the
devotion to the Incarnation are most singular and most
important.

Finally, we connect these lives of God with the Incarna-
tion in a most direct and obvious manner, by which also we
gain for all the first six methods of devotion to the Attributes
what seemed at first sitrht the peculiar privilege of the seventh,

THE INFANT GOD. 245

namely, those sweet shocks of surprise which carry us so
deeply into God. In other words, we reduce our first six
methods into our seventh, without deducting from any one
of them that which is most special and characteristic about
themselves. For when we have contemplated these lives of
God, or any number of them, we fall back in a sort of repose
of spirit upon the Babe in His manger, or the Carpenter- Boy
at Nazareth, or the Man upon the Cross, and behold Him
at that moment awfully and worshipfully living all those
lives in the fleshly recesses of a Sacred Human Heart, or in
another way, the Sacred Human Heart living them in God.

When a finite mind occupies itself upon an object, which
is vast and simply infinite, as God is, its observations will
almost present the appearance of its having itself created the
object in the contemplation of which it has been engaged.
The variety of men's views of God will equal the variety of
minds which take views of Him at all. We seem to make
our own God, because we see but a part of Him. The char-
acter of our own mind imprints itself so strongly on our
conceptions of Him, that it really looks as if we had but
projected Him from our own thoughts, and then called Him
God. Everything is true of God which may be honourably
said of Him. Apparent contradictories will be found true
of one who is infinite. But in truth all this appearance of
unreality thrown over our conceptions of God is but the
tribute of our ignorance and blindness to His unimaginable
infinity. Thus the life of God will divide itself differently
to difi'erent minds. Things in God, which appear to one
mind to lie apart from each other, to another mind will seem
identical All that is absolutely necessary is that all divisions,
whatever they may be, should be understood to be faulty
divisions. If they were not acknowledgedly such, they
would lead to falsehood and not to truth. They must all
contain each other, repeat each other, and be at once complete

246 THE INFANT GOD.

and incomplete, each of them in itsell We must be aware
that this is the case throughout, just as much as we must
be aware of our Lord's Divinity while we are musing on the
mysteries of His Humanity. God stands so full in His own
light, that, when we look at Him in front, He is invisible.
We must throw His own light upon Himself by changing
our position, first here and then there. He does not move.
He is in omnipresent repose for ever. But we catch glimpses
of Him by the aid of our own mutabilities.

Not one of these lights is true, not one of them false.
For practical purposes they are all true. They only become
false, when they claim to be an adequate illumination of
God. Some of these lights we gain by looking at God as an
external immensity, which is the loosest and least accurate
view of Him there is, yet the one commonest to most minds.
Others, and of deeper import, we obtain by looking at God
as enclosing us, as a tree sometimes encloses a stone, as if
we were within God, as we might be inside a temple, or
inside the ocean, yet uncommingled with it. Then we do
not so much look at Him as an external immensity. We
are in contact with Him. We only stand straight, because
we are built up in Him, walled up on all sides against our
own tendency to struggle and melt back into our original
nothingness. This is more nearly our true position than the
other. We are all built up in God, and can only act towards
each other through Him and in Him. This is a terrifying
view of life to those who do not love. Pantheists break
down the partitions, and make us dissolve into the divine
life, so that we ourselves are part of God, and, if a part of
Him, then, God being God, in some sense the whole of Him.
This is but the poetic form of atheism. But our best and
deepest lights, the fewest in number because the observa-
tions are so hard to take, are gained from our looking at God
as inside ourselves, with our littleness compassing His in.

THE INFANT GOD. 247

finity, so that we are all likenesses of Mary during the nine
months she carried Jesus in her bosom. These lights are
very rare, but they are so much nearer the truth that they
are worth almost any number of the rest

Venturing then to look at God's eternity, as we look at
our Lord's Three-and-Thirty Years, it seems as if we might
view Him leading eighteen different lives, different lives
which are yet but one adorable life, that has neither past
nor future, but an eternal present, — neither movement nor
inequality, but an everlasting equable tranquillity. Much
worship comes out of few thoughts, where God is concerned.
His magnificence in our conceptions is not in the richness
of detail, but in the vastness of solitary grandeurs set in
immense spaces, like the constellations of the southern seas.
Thus we may adore His secret life out of sight of all His
creatures, hidden from the first, hidden now, for ever hidden.
We may worship His secret life as it is disclosed to those
who see the Vision in heaven, the object of our own yearn-
ings and perpetual patient discontent with self. We may
worship, it is the one business of our lives. His secret life
as far as it is shown to faith. We may contemplate with
perplexed wonder the life of God as it is affected both by
the existence of His creatures, and their worship.

He has a life in the material world, a life in the moral
world, a life in the intellectual world, a life in the spiritual
world of grace, a life in the world of glory. God has also
a public life in external government, which is his life as king.
He has a life in punishing ; for his vindictive justice is one
of His incessant grandeurs. He has a life in rewarding, in
which He manifests His inner treasures by the copious out-
pouring of them upon His creatures He has a different life
in each of His different creations. He has a life in the
fortunes of humanity, considering our whole race as one,
BLd He has another life in each individual soul of man.

248 THE INFANT GOD.

He has a life which is imitable, and which is disclosed to
us in order to be imitated, and a life which is visible but
perplexing to our finite views, and so not imitable, and
finally an unimaginable life. These are the lives of God,
with which our prayer may reverently and fruitfully employ
itself. We know that He has many more lives than these,
and that many more will strike other minds. We know that
He is living all these lives at once, and that He cannot live
any of them separately. We know that He is complete in
each one of them, and self-suflScient, and infinitely adorable.
We know that of Him in each of these lives we may predi-
cate all conceivable positive perfection, and deny of Him
all conceivable possible infirmity. We know also that the
beautiful transitory darkness, which He sometimes deigns
to throw over our breathless souls, is a better and a nearer
thing to Him than all these lights of ours, better than
words, for it is simply indescribable, — nearer than thought,
for thought dies in worship then. But when he withholds
that gift, which we must not ask, when He does not come
down Himself, and proclaim silence in our souls, and press
us to Him in the dark, then is it by these other, or like
modes, of conceiving of our ever-blessed Maker and Father,
that He Himself mercifully invites, nay even lovingly pro-
vokes, the daring littleness of our prayer to compete with
His magnificence.

There are three imaginary epochs in all the lives of God,
according to the view which the creatures of any of His
creations take of Him, There is the eternity before creation
at alL There is the time which is the duration of our own
particular creation. There is the subsequent eternity, which,
whether occupied with other creations or not, is only
occupied with us as being our home attained and our beati-
tude fulfilled. From our point of view all these epochs
have strongly marked characteristics of their own. The

THE INFANT GOD. 249

eternity before creation is distinguished by the blissful self-
companioned solitude of the Most Holy Trinity. The act of
Creation, and its prolonged continuity in the Preservation
of creatures, appear to confer upon God Attributes, which
He could not have had except as Creator, or at least to
bring into action beautiful depths of His Nature, which,
so in our ignorance it seems to us, could have had no
functions in His own inward Life of Three Persons. The
eternity after the Doom, whether occupied with fresh crea-
tions or not, to us represents God as joyously reposing upon
the immense family of glorified creatures whom He has
introduced into His own home. Now some of the lives of
God, which we contemplate in our prayer, belong to one or
other of these epochs, while others belong to two of them
at once, and others abide unchanged during all the three.
But we take no count of this in our contemplations. It is
essential to us that each life of God should seem His whole
life while we are gazing upon it. We are not musing on
the history of God, but on God. We must have Him there-
fore before us as the eternally and immutably present God
There are other times when we may venture to look at
God's eternity, as if it were a successive biography; and
deep thoughts of adoration will flow in upon us as we so
regard it. But it does not belong to that peculiar method
of devotion to the Divine Attributes, with which we are
now concerned.

When we contemplate the secret life of God, which is
out of sight, — space, which to our conceptions at least is
practically boundless, for what will that thing be like, which
confines upon us, yet lies outside its boundary? — space,
although populous with possible creations, dwindles to a
point, becomes too insignificant to be taken into account,
and does not affect the life of God. His own life as God
\B something vaster than His occupation as Creator, and ii

250 THE INFANT GOD.

is upon that invisible life that we fix our eyes, and worship.
There is a joy so limitless that it fills the infinite nature of
the Three Divine Persons, which in no way flows from
creatures, nor is it in any degree influenced by them. In
this indescribable, self-sufficing beatitude resides this secret
life of God, which He is living at each point of space, in
each point of time, and far away beyond all space, and
unbeginningly and unendingly before and after all time.
We gaze upon it, and see nothing, and are satisfied. The
very shapeless thought of it is happiness to our love. We
have no figures to express it by, no analogies by which we
can bring it home to ourselves, no comparisons the use of
which would not seem to us an irreverent license of the
imagination. We know that such an adorable life exists,
and the mere knowledge bathes our souls in joy. We are
out upon it ourselves, and it is a deep sea, without features,
landmarks, or constellations. There is no compass to point,
to vary, or to dip ; for it is itself, — that deep, horizonless,
glad ocean, it is itself the ever-present home of the Eternal

Then again the boundless waters of that sea suddenly of
themselves change the scene. They come nigh to a loving
coast, studded beautifully with the spirits of angels and
the souls of men, who gaze in silent or vocal rapture upon
that many-featured deep, which rolls without resonance
before them. One while it is a halcyon calm, such a calm
as creatures do not know, and its peacefulness tingles through
their spirits. There is a brooding beauty over the waves
which would destroy life by the vehement ecstasy which it
produces, were not the immortality of the fortunate elect
immensely fortified by God Himself. Then again come
storms of such exceeding grandeur as to turn their whole
capacious lives of glory into pure music, loud, and swelling,
jind glorious, sounding along the eternal shore. There are
mornings there, dawning upon new sights seen far off in

THE INFANT GOD. 251

God, like flashing things coming into view from inexhaus-
tible eternities which lie far onward still, and out of which
fresh splendours may be travelling towards the Blessed
perpetually.* There are noons also, hushed, deep, entrantv
ing, which appear to make visible, or sensible, or intelligible,
the stationariness of eternity. Then come evenings of such
restful loveliness, that the spirit is drowned in the contented-
ness of their uncreated beauty, and loses itself in a trance
of unutterable satisfaction on the bosom of God. It is these
evenings which make eternity a home. There is no night
there, but there is the gorgeous spirit of nocturnal beauty,
at once brightly, softly, starrily shading the depths of the
Incomprehensible, and by shading them enabling the eye
to see far down into their glancing and mysterious caverns.
But there is no succession of these visions. All are at once.
One does not paint out the other. The storms do not break
up the calms, nor the calms assuage the storms. It is
dawn, and noon, and evening-light always on that exulting
sea. It is the life of God disclosed in abiding vision to the
loyal and the pure.

There is, again, the secret life of God as it is shown to
faith. It is no mere boundless presence to which we strain
our imaginations, no mere exquisitely piercing essence which
we vainly endeavour by the eloquent exaggerations of language
to express. God bids faith unveil no little of His hidden
life even to us distracted wanderers amidst the excessive
occupations and uncongenial weariness of life. One while
as the exulting Trinity of Persons, another while as the
infinitely blissful Unity of Essence, God manifests Himself
to us with immutable variety. Ever before us we behold
the Unbegotten Father, out of whose pacific fountains all
Godhead is rapturously flowing; evermore magnifying and

* We must remember the axiom of theology about the Vision : Deui
totus visus est, sed non totaliter.

252 THE INFANT GOD.

adorning His own primacy by the coequality of the Spirit
and the Son ; evermore seated on His awful throne with a
peace and a stability which it almost oppresses created spirit
to contemplate; lone yet not alone, in a peculiar grandeur
which is the more solitary because it is equally and rightfully
shared with His Word and with His Love ; a Person to
whose supremacy there is no corresponding subordination ;
hidden in the blaze of the incomprehensible love wherewith
the Spirit and the Son environ Him ; the home of the
Divinity where no mission reaches ; the Person furthest in
Name from creatures, yet with the most creaturelike relations
of the Three ; a Father in whom all sweet fatherhoods have
been eternally combined, out of whom comes the indul-
gence of all justice, and the omnipotence of all forbearance ;
unspeakably compassionate yet unspeakably immutable,
infinitely tender yet infinitely imperturbable; a Person so
inaccessible and yet so incredibly familiar that it is hard to
think of Him without tears of love. Ever before us we
behold the Eternally Begotten Son, in His unbeginning
beginnings, in His never-ending ends, issuing forth from the
Father in blinding abysses of light ; glowing from out the
ineffably refulgent sanctuaries of uncreated life ; always being
begotten, always the very actual, instantaneous, coequal,
coeternal image of the mighty Father, and whose Generation
is a glory and a loveliness enough of its own self to fascinate
numberless creations with its beauty and its splendour, and
to overwhelm them in an intolerable excess of unending
jubilation. Ever before us we behold the Eternally Pro-
ceeding Spirit, in His Procession at once beginning and yet
being perfect for evermore ; flashing before us like a sea of
light from out the blazing ocean of the Father and the Son,
in an unspeakable orderly tumult of uncreated gladness ;
jubilant exceedingly with speechless cries and silent music
and all the unvocal clangour of unutterable triumph, whose

THE INFANT GOD. 253

beauty is as that of fire, with banners flying and golden
chariots mutely rolling along its everiasting march, as if the
vast Godhead were blissfully unfolding itself in its own
unimaginable sunshine. Yet ever before us also we behold,
likest of all things to the Vision of the Blest, the fixed, im-
mutable, simple, self-sufficient, featureless Unity of Essence,
upon whose formless lineaments is written unchangeable,
unbeginning, unfinishing repose ; one point of indefinite
whiteness ; a splendour which stirs not and does not flash ;
far- withdrawn yet everywhere, all-embracing yet separate as
a sanctuary, whose adorable monotony, seen at one glance,
yet brooking, unmoved and unscintillating, the searching
gaze of all creations, is of its own sole Self light, and nourish-
ment, and rest, and jubilee, and immortality to the believ-
ing souL

There is the life of God, again, as it is aff'ected by the
existence of His creatures, and their worship. How could
He be just, if He had no subjects to whom out of the pleni-
tude of His power He had made concessions and given
rights, or with whom in the condescensions of His familiarity
He had made covenants and had entered into engagements 1
How could the Father be merciful to the Son, or the Father
and the Son to the Holy Ghost ? How can there be com-
passion for the Co-equal 1 Yet how sweetly God triumphs
in His mercy, as if, dare we say it 1 He were proud of that
most gorgeous Attribute ! But in some sense is it not to us
He owes the possession of this Attribute, over which He
broods with such complacency t Oh in how many ways, ways
we should never have dreamed of had He not revealed them,
ways still unrevealed and so undreamed-of still, does He allow
creatures to enter into His deep tranquil life, and as it were
to make currents on its surface ! What an endless field of
contemplation there is here 1 We may not roam in its wide
pastures now, or we shall lose sight of Bethlehem : but how

254 THE INFANT GOD.

adorable the while is that dread immutability, into which
such changes are ever flowing, and ceasing to be changes
when it has silently engulphed them 1

What are all sciences but sparkles of the life God leads in
the world of nature and of matter ? Every phenomenon is
a transparency in the many-coloured mantle in which He has
arrayed His immensity. Every law is but a fraction of His
will, and therefore a partial revelation of Himself. Yet the
sciences are many, and each science has many kingdoms,
and each of those kingdoms many provinces, and each
province its subdivisions and departments ; and the mightiest
intellect, in the activities of a long life, is unequal to the
exhaustion of one of these departments Discovery advances
with gigantic strides, and at each step rather destroys all
limits to our conjectures of our ignorance, than widens the
horizon of our knowledge ; while at each step it is always
adding to the bulk of those beautiful revelations of God,
which are the treasures as well as the records of the sciences.
The symmetry of each whole science is another kind of
divine revelation, and the connection of the sciences another,
and the unity of all collective sciences yet another and more
magnificent. God has a life in the wayward uniformities of
each wild-flower in the fields, in the inexplicable instinct of
each variety of animal and insect, in the quivering orbits of
rolling worlds, in the stately stepping of the clouds which
march to the music of the upper winds, in every sight and
sound and fragrance and taste of nature. AU comes, not
merely came at the first but comes now, for ever comes out
of the mind of God, and is a disclosure to us of His life,
holding undisclosed in every atom more mysteries of that
life than the countless ones which it discloses.

The material world is as when we look through the
pellucid sea, and behold the many- coloured pebbles, catch-
ing the sunlight and glinting at the bottom, and the fairy-

THE INFANT GOD. 255

like gardens of the ocean flora, and the radiant fauna feeding,
or basking, or making beautiful war amidst those submarine
groves and rosy shades, and the gauze-like medusae floating,
like the bells out of which the musical sea-murmur is ever
ringing as the restless water swings. But the moral world,
the world of wills and crimes and virtues, is as when the
sun is overcast, and the blue sky is an inky grey, and the
rude wind ruffles the waves, and the subaqueous revelation
is withdrawn. Yet even there too is an order, and a legiti-
mate recurrence of phenomena, and a beautiful harmony of
cycles, and an imposing majesty of law, all full of revelations
of that stormy life of unattainted peace which God lives in
the wills of men, a life sometimes awfully encrusted with
human crime and worthlessness, like the life of unknown
brightness which the diamond leads in its unviolated mine.
This too is a life of God which we often ponder ; and the
past lives of every one of us must have written volumes of
it in our thoughts, with hardly one sentence in them all
which would not feed a hundred controversies, but which
for us have done something better in feeding our devotion.

From the right point of view what is the whole of the
intellectual world but one enormous realm of inspiration,
a singular gifted creation of power and beauty, of eloquence
and song, with the life of God deep hidden in its thought-
mines, nay with millions of divine lives flung off in the
shining spray of its cataracts of glorious words? In each
felicity of the human understanding there is a life of God,
in the glow of each discovery a thrill of His eternal jubilee.
The philosopher's chains of cogent reasoning, the historian's
just and faithful eye, and the benignity of his appreciation,
the creations of the poet with his glory-nurtured mind and
grandeur- haunted imagination, the articulate speaking of the
artist's pencil, the chisel of the sculptor filling the dead
marble with looks and voices which speak an intelligible

256 THE INFANT GOD.

eloquence for ages, an eloquence whose silence all nations
listen to and understand, the almost creative breath of the
Christian statesman's sympathetic science, who is all artists
in himself, and whose divine occupation reflects a sort of
divinity on his mind, the fanciful fabrics of fiction-writers
that hang for a few moments across the sky like the gay
arches of the rainbow, or like the transient prismatic belts
round the waists of the fluent waterfalls, the new life which
the fruitful formality of diligent induction is everywhere
calling up, making the old new, and the barren to be the
mother of many children,— what are all these but inspira-
tions, pieces of divine life which lose their bloom in our hot
hands, plastic things from heaven taking endless shapes, yet
never altogether losing the ancestral look and air of their
divinity t Wild world of intellect ! even amidst its life of
riotous beauty and degenerating truth God lives a life,
solemn, holy, calm, and nigher to the surface than His life
mostly lies.

In the world of grace the pulses of the divine life are
almost visible. Each actual grace is an impulse of the
divine will, proceeding out of the depths of an illimitable
mercy, an exquisite justice, and an infinite intelligence : and
who shall number each day's actual graces on the earth 1
Each additional degree of sanctifying grace is a still more
wondrous mystery ; for it is a distinct communication of the
divine nature. Yet the drops of a rain-shower, which
covered a square league, would scarce equal the number of
these additions of grace which souls on earth receive in the
course of one solar day. The extraordinary graces of the
saints are all different revelations of God. Each saint is a
gospel of himself, notably different from all other living
gospels, yet harmonising almost to miracle with them all
Each conversion, and there are thousands daily, is a divine
work of art, standing by itself, each in its own way being

THE INFANT GOD. 257

a heavenly masterpiece. Every Christian deathbed is a
world, a complete world, of graces, interferences, compensa-
tions, lights, struggles, victories, supernatural gestures, and
the action of grand spiritual laws. Each deathbed, explained
to us as God could explain it, would be in itself an entire
science of God, a summa of the most delicate theology.
The varieties of grace in the individual soul are so many
infinities of the one infinite life of God. The world of grace
is truly the theatre of His visible miracles. God is mar-
vellous, says Scripture, in His saints.

In the world of glory, too, there is another life of God,
There is one life of Him as He is seen in the Vision, and
to that we have already alluded. But there is another life
of Him as He lives in the glory and blessedness of those
who are admitted to gaze upon that Vision. The varieties
of grace seem to come the nearest of all created things we
know of to being strictly innumerable. But we may well
believe that the varieties of glory, which we hardly know at
all, far outnumber those of grace. If God has a life in each
wild-flower, what a beautiful immortal life must He not
have in each discriminating shade of glory ! Look over that
huge empire of the angelic legions, and over the multitude
of human souls, which the Holy Ghost Himself calls count-
less; sum up the variety of their powers and the serene
capacity of their faculties and their almost fathomless
affections, all filled full to overflowing with indescribable
beatitude ; and what a life of God, what a manifold tran-
quillity and work of all His blissful Attributes are there !
That vast world is a lake which images the mountains of
the Beatific Vision which surround it, and by imaging it,
changes it, and makes it as it were a second created Beatific
Vision, another life of the blessed God.

God has a life also in His government. Upon what
strange principles, as we count them, does His Providence

B

258 THE INFANT GOD.

frequently proceed ! His justice is not as our justice, noi
His kindness as our kindness. He has other measures.
Sometimes how swift His justice is, sometimes how slow ;
sometimes how proportionate His retributions look, and
sometimes how disproportionate they seem ! How swiftly
He flies to His end, and then another while by what
circuitous routes and stealthy feet as if they were shod with
moss does He circumvent His end ! Why does He claim
here, and then concede there ? What must the divine logic
be like, when to finite apprehensions it is so often neces-
sitated to look illogical ? How He drives His creatures like
sheep, and again how He caresses them, as if He were their
nurse ! He makes Himself poor that He may have the
pleasure of begging from them, and then opens heaven and
rains down incredible happiness upon them. On this side
there is punishment almost preceding the ofience, and on
the other a tortoise-footed vengeance pacing after a guilty
nation for centuries and purposely failing to come up with
it There are few things out of heaven, which teach us so
much of God as His style of government.

His life in punishment is wide enough to be a life of
itself, apart from the other functions of His government;
and the same also may be said of His life in rewarding.
In both He is an unknown God, whom we never come to
know, and yet practically always know. Both in punishing
and rewarding He always takes us by surprise, because His
processes are always unexpected. What act of God is
more like a law of natural development, than that which
consigns the finally impenitent soul to its hopeless doom ?
Yet can we believe that ever soul yet has heard that
sentence at His judgment-seat, but it has been horribly
taken by surprise ? Must it not also require a special
concurrence of Omnipotence to hinder the glad soul from
breaking, and so spilling its immortal life, during the first

THE INFANT GOD. 259

moment which follows the judicial decree of its everlasting
bliss 1 There is science enough to he inferred from hell,
to construct a very faithful and adorable image of God.
As He rewards so He punishes, yet with differences. Aa
He punishes, so He rewards, yet with differences also.
The punishments of purgatory, are th«y not a Bible in
themselves 1 The punishments of earth ! if we think of
them, what are our thoughts but either adoration or
unbelief ?

How differently God has dealt with His creation of
men, from what He did with His creation of angels ; yet
the two were one family of Jesus ! So God may have,
may have them now or may have them in time to come,
millions of creations ; and it is plain that His life in every
one of them will be different. As these differences of
creations, though not beyond the possibility of being con-
ceived, are in fact beyond our conceptions, so also must
the differences be of those mysterious, half-hidden and
half-disclosed, lives which God may lead in them.

Again, it is manifest that humanity, the whole human
race of all times and climes, is a unit, and has a progressive
history and a very significant destiny of its own, apart from
the separate fortunes of the individuals who compose it, the
living atoms so dear to God as we each of us know ourselves
to be. IS^ow God must have some life of glory in this
humanity as a whole. For heaven transfers to itself none
of the history of earth, but only earth's biographies. Em-
pires cast no shadow over the population of the courts
above, neither do nationalities erect partitions there. The
discoveries of the scientific few are obliterated there by the
instantaneous superior intuition of the baptized child. The
mightiest revolutions of earth, the grand streams of its
ethnography, the fertile consequences of its physical geo-
graphy, the stupendous developments of its civilisation

36o THE INFANT GOD.

the immense catastrophes of its historical ruins, are no
further represented in heaven than as they told for or against
the salvation of this or that particular soul, who now, be-
cause of them or in spite of them, is safely housed in its
Father's home.

Yet humanity has its significance, as a unit, and finds
it in some mysterious life of most hidden glory which God
lives beneath its vicissitudes and its destiny. The life of
God in the individual soul is still more intimate and intel-
ligible. Who does not know how true this is? The
moment our past becomes plain to us, we see that it has
been full of God. There is nothing of which we are more
sure than that we have never been left to ourselves, never
left to live this life of ours alone. In everything we have
been two, not one. Hence it is that there is no such thing
as unhappiness in life, except when through a mistake we
feel or fancy ourselves alone. Moreover, what a life of won-
ders our life has been, such a scriptural thing, when we come
to consider it, so like the lives of the patriarchs of old, God
with us and we not afraid, the commonest events being under
another aspect divine interpositions, all our sorrows judg-
ments, all our joys the comings of angels, as if each of us
were Isaac or Jacob, Samuel or David ! When our out-
ward life has all been uneventful smoothness, our inward
life has often been a romance of almost thrilling interest,
full of situations too bold for a dramatist's invention.
Surely God cannot have been to others as He has been
to us ; they cannot have had such boyhoods, such minute,
secret buildings up of mind and soul ; we have a feeling
that about our own lives there has all along been a
marked purpose, a divine specialty. Yet in truth how
many millions of such tender and equally special bio-
graphies is the most dear and blessed God living in men's
souls throughout all years and all generations ! We are

THE INFANT GOD. 261

not singular among men ; it is God's love which is singula!
in each of us.

God also lives a visible life which is imitable, and which
is intended to be imitated. We cannot conceive of any
creation which should not, even unconsciously, copy its
Creator. All created life must in its measure imitate the
Uncreated Life out of which it sprung. The very habits of
animals, and the blind evolutions of matter, are in some
sense imitations of God. The fern, that is for ever trembling
in the breath of the waterfall, in its growing follows some
pattern in the mind of God, Much more then is it so in
the moral world. The character of God is the one founda-
tion of all morality. The principles of morality are immut-
able, because He is immutable, the beauty of whose holiness
they faithfully though faintly represent. God is our model.
The Incarnation even has not given us another standard. It
has but made visible, with an application to creatures, the
ways and fashions, the characteristics and propensities, if we
may venture on such terms, of the Invisible God. To watch
God, and do as He does, startling as it sounds, is the rule of
holiness. We are to be perfect as our Heavenly Father is
perfect, not as perfect as He is, but perfect with the same
kind of perfection.

But God has also another life, which is visible, but not
imitable. We feel, that, while He is our rule in some things,
in others He is simply the object of our timid worship. This
life of His is not merely admirable, as being above us, but
it is perplexing, as being apparently contrary to His own
character. Eternal punishment is no model for unforgiving-
ness. The adorable look of waywardness, which there is in
God sometimes, is one of His inscrutable terrors, before
which we cower and weep silent tears ; it is not a justification
for any unequability of ours. The courtesy of a sovereign is
a difi'erent thing from that of a suliject. The immensity of

262 THE INFANT GOD.

God's sovereignty is visible upon His lineaments in the most
familiar condescensions of His love. Even His forgiveness
is sometimes rough, because of the sublimity of His justice.

Then, last of all, there is a life of God which is simply
unimaginable, and this brings us back almost to the first life
of Him we mentioned, His secret life out of sight. It would
be natural, in speaking of God, to end where we began.
But this unimaginable life is something more than hidden.
It is the infinite residue of all that is unknown about God.
It is the life in which His nameless Attributes, those unre-
vealed perfections of which theology can take no cognizance,
come into play. It is all the possible life of God, beyond
what is known, beyond what is conjectured, beyond what is
probable. It is the divine life in its deepest depths, self-
poised, self-centered, self-glorifying, unrevealable to any
possible creature, uncomprehended even by the Human Soul
of the Incarnate Word. We can make no picture of it to
ourselves, because it is based on no ideas. If we think of it
a mist falls on us through which loom forms without outlines,
proportions without shape, splendours without colour. Only
to know that there is such a life as that, is a new kneeling-
place for our worship, a new home for the soul. As we see
on earth by the light of the unrisen day, so our souls see
fresh worship, fresh fear, fresh love, in the light of this dawn
which is not only now unbroken, but which shall never
break at all on any possible created mountain-top.

We have but glanced at these various lives of God, in
order to illustrate the kind of materials which they furnish
for contemplation. The division of them is perfectly arbi-
trary. They might be divided differently, and yet with equal
truth ; or they might be multiplied almost indefinitely. We
find in all of them the Attributes of God under somewhat
varying aspects; so that if our devotion is resting at the
time on any one particular Attribute rather than the othersi

THE INFANT GOD. 263

we may fix our gaze upon it as it is manifested in any of
these lives. Above all we must discern in every one of
them an undistracted love of ourselves, a love not averted,
suspended, weakened, or less minute for one moment, but as
if it were the exclusive and full occupation which engrosses
the vast being of God. In certain wide perplexing fields of
view it occasionally seems to us as if some of the many
threads of government might be falling out of God's hand,
or as if some pressing business of the world might have to
wait until other more pressing business had been attended
to ; and even the appearance of this, for all we know it tc
be impossible, will make us tremble. Nay, we sometimes
unsuspectingly act on what we intellectually know to be an
unworthy thought of God.

It is therefore of great importance to us, unless when we
are under strong impulses in prayer, to remember God's
remembrance of ourselves ; for whatever excites our confi-
dence in Him, at the same time quickens our own sense of
responsibility towards Him. Lastly, we may apply all these
lives to any of the mysteries of the Incarnation, and especi-
ally, because of the obvious contrasts they furnish, to the
mysteries of the Sacred Infancy. In whatever situation the
gospel narrative, the necessity of the case, or our own tender
imagination, may place the Holy Cliild — at Bethlehem, in
Egypt, or at Nazareth, He was at that moment leading all
these lives. Not one of them was obscured in Him for an
instant. There was not one of them which He was not
always embracing with the fulness of divine self-conscious-
ness. Moreover, the affinity between some of these lives
and some of those mysteries will give rise to many most
touching meditations, which will show us new truths, or old
truths in a new light, and at the same time inflame our
hearts with new love and therefore with more abounding
reverence.

264 THE INFANT GOD,

But in all devotions to the Incarnation it is necesiiary,
together with our love and worship of our Blessed Lord's
Divinity, to join also a love and worship of His Peison. It
is not enough to remember that He is God. We must
remember also that He is the "Word, the Second Person of
the Most Holy Trinity. The Babe of Bethlehem in His
Mother's lap is living all those divine lives as God, yet not
as the Unbegotten Father or the Proceeding Spirit, but as
the Eternally-begotten Son. It is the Word, who is incar-
nate, because there is a fittingness in Him for such a
mystery. It is the Second Person who is a Babe at Beth-
lehem, and to whom therefore the Father and the Holy
Ghost stand now in new and peculiar relations. It is the
Second Person Incarnate who is one of the earthly Trinity,
and therefore gives the character of the Father and the Holy
Ghost to be borne by Joseph and Mary. It is the eternally,
invisibly, silently spoken Word of the Father, who is now
in time visibly and audibly outspoken to men. It is by
One Person of the Three, rather than by the other Two, that
creation is brought into such transcendent union with its
Creator. The particularities, which theology instructs us to
ascribe to the Son, are deeply marked upon the Incarnation.
By virtue of them the Incarnation of the Son is a different
mystery from what the Incarnation of the Father or the
Holy Spirit would have been.

It would not perhaps be affirming too much to say, that
there is not a single mystery of the Three-and-Thirty Years
which does not owe some of its features to our Blessed
Lord's Person, that is, to the fact of His having been not
the First or the Third Person, but the Second Person of the
Holy Trinity. Thus in all our devotions to the Incarnation,
as we must never separate His Human Nature from His
Divine, so also w« must not separate His Divine Nature
from His Divine Person. Four elements compose all the

THE INFANT GOD. 265

mysteries of Jesus, His Body, His Soul, His Divine Nature^
and His Divine Person. The different position of these four
elements, or rather the different lights cast upon them by
the events of His human life, are the causes of the differences
in the mysteries. Distinct meditation therefore on our
Lord's Person, and a distinct adoration of it, cannot be too
strongly urged on those who wish to profit to the uttermost
by the rich food which the Incarnation ministers to the soul
in prayer. On the whole the distinction is often not suffi-
ciently kept in mind. Hence arise vague ideas of our Lord's
Divinity, as if it was even hardly so definite a thing as a
nature, much less in a Divine Person ; and the consequences
are a confused generality in devotion, which often hinders
the development of reverence, and also a missing altogether
of the delicacies and refinements and spiritual subtleties in
the Incarnation, which are of themselves such marvellous
disclosures of the divine magnificence.

We may now proceed to consider that other and simpler
method of devotion to the Divine Attributes, which is so
directly connected with the mysteries of our Lord, that it
may almost rather be considered a branch of devotion to the
Incarnation, seeing that no devotion to the Sacred Humanity
is complete without it. It consists, as has been said, of the
contrasts and surprises which arise from the Divine Perfec-
tions being brought into contact with any of the mysteries
of the Three-and- Thirty Years, or of the Blessed Sacrament,
which is the prolongation of the Three-and-Thirty Years up
to the Doom, or beyond it, if there be any ground for the
opinions in favour of an eternal reservation of the Blessed
Sacrament in heaven. It furnishes us therefore with end-
less, yet very similar, meditations, founded on the model of
whab we have already supposed was Mary's first act of
worship in the midnight cave. The extreme similarity of
the meditations is, however, accompanied by that invariable

266 THE INFANT GOD.

freshness and sensation of unworn novelty, which always ^
along with the great thought of the boundless Godhead.

Let us take an imaginary scene in which to contemplate
the Divinity of the Babe of Bethlehem. Let us hasten into
the wilderness where there are the fewest real images of
creatures to distract us, and those of the most placid kind,
and in themselves, as well as because of their fewness, full
of thoughts which lead to God. Thither we can summon
all the creatures of the universe to adorn and illustrate the
glorious Attributes of the Infant God. Our Lady and St.
Joseph are in the very heart of the desert on their flight
into Egypt, weary yet less anxious now that Palestine is left
so far behind. It is in itself an astonishing mystery, the
Creator flying from His own creatures, and in such helpless
guise. Two creatures only are with Him, to wait upon His
created nature ; and those two are of such exceeding holiness
as to be the wonders of creation not only till the end of
time, but for ever. We will suppose a pair of thin-foliaged
acacia trees, islanded as it were in the desert scene, a well
between them, with a marge of faint verdure, and some of
the grey aromatic desert plants creeping over it, and all
around nothing but a shining extent of tawny sand, out-
spread like an interminable lion's skin. Mary lays the Child
gently on the dry sand under such shade as the acacia
affords, near to the edge of the well, while the sun is sloping
to its setting, so near that the risen moon is momentarily
filling with distinctive light. Let us draw near in spirit
to adore.

As we gaze upon Him, we are struck by His likeness to
His Mother. That likeness is one of His veils ; also, well
considered, one of His disclosures too, disclosing the reality
of His Mother's grandeur, disclosing also that Divinity
which she resembles, in whose image man was originally
created, and no man such an image of it as He, because aU

THE INFANT GOD. 267

others were but images of His created nature, images of God
through Him. So that even the Human Face of Jesus was
unspeakably divine.

What can be more weak and helpless than that little
weary Child, in whose first months this hard pilgrimage to
Egypt has to be endured? Yet both that weakness and
that weariness are full of mysteries. In His weakness faith
sees His omnipotence. That little One is boundless, bound-
less as an unimaginable sea, and what awful might does not
such immensity suppose 1 We are obliged to call His power
by the name of power, because we have no other word to
express that sovereignty which our highest ideas of power
dishonour rather than rightly estimate. It is something
which can reach strange, nameless heights beyond the region
of any intelligible miracles. It implies unthinkable depths
and possibilities of facile, gigantic, indefinable energy, all
lying as it were coiled up in that handful of human life,
that tiny burden of swaddling-clothes upon the sand. He is
weary because He has been carried all day, poor uncomplain-
ing Babe, hunted by men as if He were some beautiful wild
beast of the wilderness whom they were eager to slay for the
loveliness of His spoils. He has been for hours helpless and
cramped in the bandages that swathed Him, and His limbs
ache with the monotonous posture.

Yet not the less, rather all the more, we recognise Him as
the strong, unfatigued Creator, who built the mountains,
anchored the seas, lighted the volcanoes, and is at that
moment making the crust of the great and ever-quaking
earth undulate, like a poplar in the wind, or an uncut hay-
field in the breath of the sunrise. He it is who sent the
swift stars on their rushing courses, and built the ponderous
worlds out of an ever-fluent web of weightless elements, and
is now undistractedly attending to all those things as He lies
apon the sand. It is He, to take but one instance from

268 THE INFANT GOD.

nature's least important provinces, who is at that moment
tlioughtfully, considerately, specially, proportionately minis-
tering to every atom of phosphoric life in all the transitory,
heaving, moon-sparkling hollows of the liquid sea.

Sleep comes over Him, as He lies upon the sand. What
a wonder also is His sleep ! He is the Unbeginning Eternal
He was an eternity old before creation began, and has never
known vicissitude. Yet to His creatures' eyes He has had
a grand everlasting life of portentous changes, which yet
stir not His adorable immutability. To Him what a myste-
rious mutation is the shadowy spell of sleep, which takes
the light of His eyes captive so swiftly and so stealthily,
His infantine weakness succumbing to its approach ! He
has shut His eyes to the sunset, and is in the dark. Yet
there is no night to Him. "We know Him best as unap-
proachable light. "Were God, — do not look up to heaven,
but on that little Slumberer beneath the acacia branches, —
were God to close His eyes in sleep one instant, all created
life would perish utterly. All matter and spirit would rush
together, and cease to be, and time and space be buried in
the instantaneous universal grave of things. Yet look how
closely the eyelids are drawn down, how regularly the
bosom lifts itself in little heavings, how more and more
audible the deeper breathings are ! God is really asleep.

He wakes and weeps. He wakes, the intermission of
whose vigilance is impossible. He weeps who is illimit-
able, uncreated joy. All pleasures, that we can think or
name, or think further than we can name, vast, deep, rich,
unutterable, steadfast, ungrowing, are in Him, or rather He
is a gladness beyond them all. In truth the very perfec-
tions of all conceivable joys would be imperfections in His
joy, and detractions from His blessedness. Look at the
little bird sipping from the huge sheet of an American
lake, then back to its nest in the silver fir. So will count-

THE INFANT GOD. 269

less angels and men be eternally drinking vast torrents oi
joy on the merest brink of that Babe's being, and He be
no more drained, and no more affected by it, nay, less so,
because in reality not at all, than gigantic Lake Superior
whence the little singing-bird took one sip, and flew away.
Is it the bands which are around Him that hurt Him, and
make Him stoop to the facile tears which are the law of
childhood ?

Infancy is truly a prisoner in the incommodious swad-
dling-clothes of those lands, but in that Prisoner on the
sand we recognise and worship the Immense. It is He
who is the everlasting freedom of the world. He, who is
there circumscribed within a given number of inches, in
reality is at that instant expatiating beyond the clouds and
the sunsets and the great stars and the frightening vastness
of the heavy circling systems, and finds no term, comes to
no limit, overflowing all possibilities of space in the grandeur
of His simplicity. When we have filled with Him all the
worldless abysses that we can imagine, we are then no
nearer to an external edge of that Babe's life than we were
before. But are His tears always silent tears, or does He,
like other children, utter cries, cries of piteous eloquence,
inarticulate appeals to a mother's love which somehow finds
the right interpretations for them 1 If it were so, how His
puling cry would thrill through our inmost soul, a thousand
times more than the archangel's trumpet in the night of
doom ! From out of the complaining treble of that cry
faith would disembarrass the Voice of the Everlasting, the
Voice which Scripture compares to the sound of many
waters ; yet, like the noises of the dumb. His cry is with-
out language. He is without words who is the Father's
Word. He seems to know no language, of some one sound
of whose inward music all languages are but a fragmentary,
yet what a ravishing revelation, ^ revelation which cannot

270 THE INFANT GOD.

now gather itself up or back into the oneness which it
has forgotten ! All language is but one strain, escaped to
earth, from that silent jubilee of the creatureless majesty
of God, in those old inconceivable epochs, which were not
epochs, because there was no time.

Look at His poverty, whose every circumstance claims
tenderest pity and devoutest tears. We see it in the faces
and the garb of Mary and of Joseph, and in the barrenness
of provision which is around, beneath the tent of the open
sky. Yet in that Child of poverty we adore the majesty
before whom the heavenly hierarchies are at that instant
prostrate, and tremble, even though they comprehend it
not in its fulness. His riches are inexhaustible and in-
calculable. He is the plenitude of creation, out of whom
millions of new hungering and thirsting creations could
draw their manifold gleaming wealtli, and make no impreS'
sion on the fulness. His treasures are not only indescrib-
able in their degree, but unimaginable in kind, with infinities
which are not suited to our wants, or to any expenditure of
creatures, but belong, if we may so speak, to the transcen-
dental seeming needs of the illimitable intelligence and
holiness of God, to those adorable necessities of the Divine
Life out of which inevitably proceed the Eternal Genera-
tion of the Son and the Eternal Procession of the Spirit.

In the Child vouchsafing to be eager at His Mother's
breast we adore, as the hymn of the Church suggests to
us, the God who feeds the world, and all its creatures, with
unforgetting providence. The beasts in their desert lairs,
the birds of the untrodden woods, the fishes of the sea,
the populous insects beneath the barks of trees or under
the stones of the fields, all these, together with sinners in
their palaces, and the homeless poor in the rich men's
streets, are being fed by Him. He is catering for them
even at that very hour, feeding Mary and Joseph them-

THE INFANT GOD. 271

selves by that desert well, and managing, with all the
strange varieties of climate and season, the provisioning of
the million-peopled earth, with all its attendant arrange-
ments of meteorology and chemistry. In those two sciences,
infants now but promising some day to be giants, the Babe
could have told us secrets which would startle the wisest
scholars of the present generation, and revolutionise all the
science of the world.

As the breaths of wind pass momentarily over the even-
ing waters, dimpling them with smiles of light, so the
unaccountable smiles of childhood light themselves in the
infant face, and pass away. The Babe on the sand also
smiles ; and His smile is the expression of His innumerable
perfections in the marvellous unity of a human countenance.
Smiles reveal character ; so His reveals the character of the
All-holy. It is the smile of Him who is perhaps at that
moment judging a soul, and saving it by His mercy. It is
the smile of Him who sees hell, and is keeping it in order,
feeding its fires, and by His momentary judgments adding
to its desolate population in the glory of His justice. It
is a smile, in which we may catch, like the glow of sunset
on tower or tree, the reflection of that grand worship in
heaven, which He there beholds who is still there, having
come on earth without ever leaving the Bosom of the Father,
and which He not only beholds but is actually receiving.
There is a wondering look too in His little eyes, when He
smiles. Yet what wonder can He have 1 To Him belong
the knowledge and the sight of all hearts. His glances
illuminate all secrets. His eye without effort takes in at
one gaze all the realms of space and all the kingdoms of
spiritual intelligence. To it lie open at that moment all
the hordes of thoughts of each angel or soul that ever was
or will be, whether expressed in conversation, treasured up
in books, or imbedded in the unuttered silentness of pro-

272 THE INFANT GOD.

foundest cogitation. Must not His look of wonder be part
of the dissembling of His lowliness, when His conscious-
ness is at that moment dwelling in the light of all possible
science, counting every sand in the wide wilderness, and
noting the movements and biography of every errant fish
in the vast seas, down even to each light-flash that glances
from their silver scales. He sees Calvary also, and the
dread monotony of the changeful Passion, and us with our
sins, and Himself, and the Father, and the Holy Ghost,
and wonders not, though in His beautiful sincere deceit
He wears that wondering look of human infancy.

What separate claims also to our worship has every
feature of His Countenance ! The lips which Mary with
timid frequency will dare to kiss, they are the very lips
which are one day to pronounce our last irrevocable doom.
They will perhaps speak words in heaven, like the grave
minute-bells of eternity, each of which will surpass the
revelations of earth, and will feed our souls with tingling
wisdom and divinely impassioned love. These lips are
rosy now in the freshness of their childhood; but they
have one day to be white, withered, parched, and blood-
mottled on the Cross. But to speak, not of separate features,
but of His whole beauty, it is not so much a disguise, as a
tempering down, of His uncreated loveliness, a sheathing
of His Godhead incomparably compassionate and wonderful
It is like Himself, like His own love, nearest to a revelation
of what He is. We all long to see the Father. Ages ago
Philip the Apostle told His Master so in the name of all
of us. Why is it that the Father so draws us, so pulls at
the strings of our hearts, as if we must see Him, or be home-
less and holily repining till we have seen Him 1 Look at
the Child upon the sand. He is the veritable beauty of
the Father, the beauty the Father sees in Himself, all of
it, a complete as well as a faithful representation of it.

THE INFANT GOD. 273

Moreover the Father's love of Him, that beautiful coequal
Word, and the beautiful Word's love of Him, not return
of love, but contemporary, unbeginning love, are, or is,
which shall we say? the beautiful, jubilant, ever-proceed-
ing Spirit. If we sin-maimed creatures, who have barely
crawled out of our evil into the sunshine of God's compas-
sion, can see all this in His childish beauty on the sands,
what did Mary see ?

But the sun is setting fast. Now the orb has sunk,
sending a quivering effulgence of gold and crimson from
its low level on the horizon over the unbroken smoothness
of the stony sands. Mary and Joseph fall on their knees
to pray, as if the pulses of light rang golden bells up in
heaven to tell them it was compline tima It is not to
the heaven above they look, nor to the ever-present
Invisible, whose presence men acknowledge by shrouding
their faces with their hands ; but, like believers who steady
themselves in prayer by fixing their eyes upon the taber-
nacle, they look and pray to that Almighty Child, whom
Mary has laid for a moment on the sand.

Who can doubt the subject of their contemplations?
Verbum caro factum est : the Word was made flesh ! It
is the joy of joys to the whole earth. It is the mystery
within whose precincts other mysteries dwell in light. It is
the making visible of the invisible queen of all mysteries,
the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Of all other mysteries, but
that, the Incarnation is itself the chief. Creation ranges
itself beneath its banners. It was therefore the Divinity
of the Word, which Mary and Joseph were adoring. The
more that visible circumstances seemed to put forward
emphatically and prominently our Lord's Humanity, the
more did they provoke faith in His Divinity. But the
Mother and the Foster-father did not approach that mystery
OS we liave done. We have had to feel our way to it, to

274 THE INFANT GOD,

persuade ourselves of it by as it were touching it, and
making sure of it palpably, by means of geography, scenery,
and the measures of time and space which science gives
us, limiting even while enlarging our conceptions. They
saw it in a simpler way, by higher processes of the soul,
as became the grandeur of their holiness, and the privilege
of their vicinity to God. Still it was faith in His Divinity,
which was the soul of their communing with Him. The
actual practical faith, that our Lord is God, is something
higher and sweeter than meditations on the mystery of
the Incarnation, or on His Divine Perfections. It is our
very life as llis redeemed and pardoned creatures. It is the
basis of all devotion, as it is the ground of all holiness.
Without this faith, and the holy fear and reverence which
spring from it, devotions to the Sacred Humanity have
little better than an artistic beauty. The deeper we go
into this doctrine the more real seems the mystery of the
Blessed Sacrament, the more lofty the majesty of Mary.
But the Sacred Infancy is the especial field in which this
faith should expatiate. Comparisons are seldom true in
sacred things ; else we might almost say that Bethlehem is
more a devotion of our Lord's Divinity even than Calvary ;
and yet it is His Divinity which is the soul of each mystery
of the Passion. The vision of the Holy Child to the
Venerable Margaret of Beaune, with the words Verbum
caro factum est written on the palm of His hand in letters
of gold, is a kind of symbol of what our devotion to the
Sacred Infancy ought to be. We should desire that our
Lord would do for us spiritually, what He did for St. Mary
Magdalen of Pazzi materially, on whose heart those same
words were engraven. He Himself told St. Gertrude that
every time a Christian bowed reverently when they were
uttered, He offered for him to the Eternal Father aU the
fruits of His sacred Humanity; and on one occasion, by

THE INFANT GOD. 275

divine suggestion if I remember rightly, Margaret of Beaune
spent several hours simply repeating those potent words
in order to impetrate from the Eternal Father mercy for
blasphemers. With a like spirit the Church bids us sink
upon our knees, as we daily pronounce these words in the
last Gospel at the altar.

In these days we must take great heed to our faith in
our Lord's Divinity. Heresy one while neglects our Blessed
Lord's Humanity, and another while His Divinity. In
our own times it is the fashion of men to develop, as
they phrase it, the human features in Christ. They talk
in the empty, pedantic grandiloquence of the day, of
exhibiting and producing the human element of Jesus.
Thus to an unbelieving people religion has neither facts
nor doctrines in the strict sense of those words, but only
symbols and views. In astronomy men delight in making
the dubious nebula resolve itself into the lucid separateness
of individual stars ; but in theology they reverse this pro-
cess. There they are fain to superinduce vagueness over
what has once been clear, so as to make theology a shape-
less nebular light, about which they can theorise and con-
jecture as they please, finding in its huge spiral convolu-
tions or the lineaments of its ragged edges such fantastic
likenesses as made the men of old give their names to the
constellations. Now whence this love of vagueness in the
matter of religion, joined with such a craving for definite-
ness in all other departments of human knowledge, but
from a desire to evade the yoke of faith without the
inconvenient boldness of publicly rejecting it? On our
part, therefore, the spirit of reparation must be always
on the watch to bring its tender succours to the rescue
of our Lord's honour at the point of attack, wherever that
may be. So now, while the faith keeps us in an equable
and intelligent entireness about our belief, reparation will

276 THE INFANT GOD.

lovingly devote itself to a more than usually fervent worship
of the Eternal Word.

But in the desert of Mary, Joseph, and the Babe, we
almost need to be forgiven even this momentary glance at
an evil world. The swift twilight passes. The night-wind
sighs heavily over the wilderness. All but the wild-beasts
and the houseless poor are in their homes. But to-night the
Creator Himself is one of the houseless poor. He is without
a home, the hollow of whose hand is all creation's home.
He is without shelter, whose Heart is the one eternal shelter
of all angelic spirits and of all human souls. He is homeless
who is as it were Himself the home of that Eternal Father,
whose Bosom is in return His own eternal home.

I 177 )

CHAPTER VL

SOUL AND BODY.

The fountain of creation is the mind of God. Hence there
is a light and odour of eternity even about the most perishable
of creatures, or the most evanescent of material phenomena.
They reveal God. They are emanations of His wisdom and
disclosures of His beauty. They are His works of art, His
peculiar thoughts. His music and His poems. There is
nothing in creation which does not bring something of His
along with it, nothing which a student of God would not
recognise for His by the fashion of it, independent of his
knowledge that all things are from God. A single tree is a
divine poem. It is unimaginable to any creature, to whom
the model has not been shown. It is a many-sided wonder,
having a deep science in it as well as a deep fountain of
beauty. Yet no two trees, even of the same kind, are alike
in the interlacing of their branches, the arrangement of their
foliage, or their position with regard to the light of the sun,
whose beams play silent music on its rising or depressed
boughs and amidst its quivering leaves, as fingers play upon
the keys.

Yet trees are but one class, an inferior and subordinate
class, among the countless poems which form the harmonious
unity of creation. When we rise therefore through the
rational world into the world of grace, still more complete
and awe-inspiring are the creatures of God, regarded as

278 SOUL AND BODY.

manifestations of His invisible beauty and the literally
infinite variety of His simple unity. But it is the lowest
creatures which bring most home to us that all creature*
have a real dignity, and a significance which entitles then
to reverence, simply as being the creatures of God, as having
His mark upon them, and savouring of His fragrance, which
is as well known to our spiritual senses, as the odour of that
flower on earth which we may happen most of all to love.
It is but one proof of the consistency of the Scotist theology
that the same school, which gives so dignified a place to
creation in its philosophy, should also differ from other
schools in treating the beauty of God, as a separate divine
Attribute in itself. A beauty-haunted mind, such as the
minds of poets are, sees the wisdom and the power, the
justice and the mercy of God all the more clearly in creation,
because it sees them all in the light of God's beauty. For
beauty is something more than either wisdom or power, it is
something additional to them, the lustre which makes them
plain, as the sun makes plain the separate crags of the
distant mountain, which in the shade appear to be one
smooth and purple mass. A thing might conceivably be
wise yet not beautiful, teeming with evidences of power yet
repulsive because disproportionate or inharmonious. But all
things in nature and grace are beautiful as well as wise,
beautiful as well as powerful ; and they are beautiful because
the beauty of God clings to them in virtue of their origin,
and to the very last there is something worshipful in the
least of them, because that clinging beauty never altogether
leaves them.

From these considerations we gain a view of creation,
which in these days it is of great importance to keep before
us. The battle-fields of the world change with the history
of nations. So is it in the history of intellect. It can
hardly be doubted that the battle-field of faith and unbelief

SOUL AND BODY. 279

is moving from the Incarnation to the mystery of Creation,
from the Divinity of our Lord to the Attributes of God. It
is true that faith and unbelief are always fighting at all their
points of contact ; but the thick of the battle now is amidst
the facts and difficulties of creation. Hence a true view of
creatures and their significance is of the greatest consequence,
as well that we may avoid unintelligently defending what
we are not bound to defend and what may turn out at last
to have all along been indefensible, as that we may know
better how to defend what otherwise our ignorance might
betray. No erudite theologian will refuse to admit that his
science owes more to Aristotle, and even to Plato, than it
has suffered from them, though he will not be backward to
acknowledge that the influence of those two mighty heathen
has not been an unmixed benefit. So in the present circum-
stances of the world, and looking at theology as the science
upon which the practical conversion of souls is based, it
seems as if the physical sciences were the natural allies of
theology, and a profound study of them an essential part of
a theological education.

They are of far greater importance now than metaphysics
or psychology, and have connected themselves with a greater
number of fundamental questions, while they are also in a
state of forwardness and system which renders them much
more capable of being used by the theologian. Perhaps it
would not be rash even to prophecy that the fresh start and
new development of the mental sciences, to which we must
all be anxiously looking forward, are waiting for the further
advance of certain of the physical sciences, in whose
future discoveries mental science will find another starting-
point.

Hence there are two Christian views of creatures, one
belonging to theological speculation, the other, not without an
accurate theological account of itself, to practical asceticism.

28o SOUL AND BODY.

Both views are so true, and at the same time so indispens-
able, that no devout believer can hold the one to the exclu-
sion of the other without damaging his devotion, as well as
making his faith less intelligent ; for both views are necessary
to holiness, and both are necessary to a just appreciation of
doctrine. If we look at creatures in comparison with God
Himself, we are so struck with their vileness, their nothing-
ness, and their transitoriness, that, for the moment, we can
see nothing else about them ; and all else which is predicted
of them seems untrue.

In such a comparison as this creatures are simply passive.
But it will happen not frequently, through our fault rather
than through theirs, that they appear to us as obscuring God
and eclipsing Him ; and we are then led to regard them
with something like an indignant contempt. Or again we
look at God fuU of love, and we bum as love will bum,
with a desire to make sacrifices for Him, and so prove our
love, and then creatures present themselves to us as victims,
as materials for sacrifice, and for sacrifices in which we
ourselves are the sufferers rather than the creatures which
we offer, and it is by this process that we gain our entrance
into the wide fields of voluntary mortification. Another
while our piety takes the shape of self-distrust, and we
forbear to use creatures even where we may lawfully use
them, because our experience of ourselves teaches us that
such a use unmans us, or in our particular case is likely to
run into indulgence. Out of a combination of these views
proceeds asceticism. It is therefore founded, not so much
in a disesteem of creatures as in a homage to their attractive-
ness, a homage prompted by the generosity of our love of
God, or wrung from us by an exceeding fear of ourselves, or
Btimulated by the generous spirit of uncommanded sacrifice.
What more honourable office can creatures fill than to
supply us with a means of serving God by a voluntary or

SOUL AND BODY, 281

prudential abstinence from the pleasures which they put
before us 1

This ascetical view of creatures is practical to us every
day of our lives, and therefore is the most ordinary and
common point of view for us. Yet, if we make it too
exclusive, we shall some day wake up to a sense of
unreality in it, an unreality which is not properly in the
view itself but in our exclusive way of holding it ; and
the consequence of this will be that we shall recoil too
far the other way. Experience unfortunately presents us
with many instances of this. Men, whose fervour began
with an immoderate, indiscriminate, and exaggerated view
of the evil of creatures have actually become worldly, self-
indulgent, and comfort-loving, as soon as they have per-
ceived that their own excessive opinions were untheological
and unintellectuaL Yet they still use their old language,
even when their practice has changed. A man, who talks
loudly against worldliness and yet is wedded to his little
personal comforts, is harder to convert to a real inward
life than the vilest and most habit-ridden sinner among
the sons of men. So seldom is fierceness in earnest, even
when it believes itself to be most so : for, if true earnest-
ness is not sharp with self only, it is so at least with self
first of all and most of all.

From the other point of view, which is equally true,
creatures seem full of dignity and greatness, because they
are the creatures of God. They are manifestations of His
inward life. They are, each and all of them, masterpieces.
They have had no patterns outside of God Himself. They
copied no pre-existing models. They are, as was said
above, unimaginable by angels or mea All things are
unimaginable which have neither predecessors nor analogies.
The meanest creature upon earth is mantled with the
refulgence of God's beauty, and betokens what we can only

282 SOUL AND BODY.

call an unspeakable inventiveness, though that is too mean
a word to use of creative wisdom. Thus it is that creatures
teach us so much of God, and lead us to Him by the very
pleadings of their loveliness. They can be even elevated,
as in the case of the Sacraments, into physical communi-
cations of God, and celestial agents in the kingdom of grace.
The blessing of the church can surcharge matter with the
most wonderful powers, and endow it with a sort of super-
natural life stretching even beyond the energy of angels.
There are no portals like the Sacraments for introducing us
into the actual realities of human life ; but they also open
directly into the mysterious movements of the life-giving
life of God.

Creatures are the materials of our duties, the objects of
our sciences, the divine ideas of our arts, the discipline of
our affections, and the ministers of pure and intellectual
and blameless enjoyment Who then can think lightly or
speak disparagingly of them? Even to God Himself, we
would dare to say, that creatures are of importance ; else
why should He create them t Can anything God does be
unimportant, or not be founded in deepest reasons, the
least of which are of more consequence than the wars and
revolutions of earth 1 Creation was not a necessity with
the Creator, but also it was no mere accidental overflow,
no irrepressible surplus of wisdom and power, no simple
incident in the eternity of God. It is an action deeply
rooted in Him, and separable from Him only by a mental
violence, which is practically an untruth. Above all things
it must be remembered that creation was more for His
own sake than for ours, as it is the blissful perfection of
His Nature to seek Himself in all things. It is because
self-seeking is the rule of the divine sanctity, that it is
the negation of all sanctity in a creature. Such a primary
seeking of self is in us the practical impiety of trying to

SOUL AND BODY. 283

change places with God, while a certain orderly love of
self is the foundation of our duty, and a dim shadowing in
our finite natures of the magnificent and adorable self-
seeking of God. Hence we venture to say that creatures
are, in some inexplicable sense, of importance even to the
unbeginning majesty of God.

Creation can add nothing to the essential glory of God.
We are the creatures of comparisons, because we are finite.
We can only leam values or estimate truths by comparing
them with others. We honour one thing by despising
another. We can hardly do justice to a thing without first
doing an injustice to something else. Hence it comes to
pass that God's accidental glory seems a very slight thing
to us compared with the immeasurable ocean and indefinable
splendour of His essential glory. Yet God's accidental glory,
and indeed the slightest measure of it, is a greater thing than
we can reach even by our conceptions. It is the result of
the total of creation, and is its final cause as well. Yet, as
we saw just now, it is irreverent to suppose creation to be
otherwise than of great moment even to God Himself. His
accidental glory is of moment to Him ; for He cannot pursue
what is of no moment. It is indeed infinitely below His
essential glory ; but it is at the same time infinitely above
our powers of measurement. It is something very intimate
to Him, although it is not intrinsic. In truth the whole
idea of sanctity would be lowered, if we lightly esteemed God's
accidental glory ; for what is all sanctity, even the sanctity
of our Blessed Lord's Human Nature, and indeed the whole
scheme of redemption, but a contribution to the accidental
glory of the Most High 1 Thus there is a very important
sense in which it is true that the worth of creatures to God
is greater than their worth to us. His possession of them
is great riches, even to Him. Everything about God is
unfathomable ; and it is far beyond the stretch of our minds

284 SOUL AND BODY.

to conceive what glory, and what gladness, and what mani-
fold unutterable complacency He may have in His property
of creation. The single fact that we ourselves are part of
that complacency is a lifelong contentment to our souls.

Now, looked at from this point of view, all creation is
as it were in each separate creature. Each creature is a
distinct, unresembled, and unequalled disclosure of the divine
beauty, and at the same time has such a relation to the
whole, most often invisible to us, that it cannot be separated
from it, and thus it enters into the rights of the whole, so
far as it is God's, even though it may be very low in the
graduated scale upon which the hierarchies of creatures are
constituted. The bearings of theology, regarded as a whole,
are sure to be misapprehended, if this view of creatures is
not borne in mind ; and there are not a few separate and
most important problems in theology to which this view of
creatures is the only key. To him, who for his own good
or that of others would speculate upon God, this view of
creatures must be as familiar, as the other view must be to
him in his daily ascetical relations with God Himself. Yet
it has been not an uncommon thing for men to miss this
truth, and then to wonder at the confusion and want of
coherence which they detect in their own speculations.
Many systems of theology are ragged and ungainly for
want of a philosophical view of creatures and creation.

While then believing love humbly dares to congratulate
God upon any one of His intrinsic perfections, it may also
congratulate Him upon His absolute possession of creatures,
as upon something altogether worthy of His own blessed
Self. God is indeed rich in His creation. How wonderful
are the revelations of science ! Yet they have hardly got
below the surface of things. Rather it is with the surface
of things that they mainly deal. Geology unveils to us but
the surface of time, astronomy the surface of space. It has

SOUL AND BODY. 185

but just opened to us " the delicious sense of indeterminate
size." More will come of it. The microscope rather enables
us to suspect the delicacy of creation than actually makes
it visible to us. Chemistry makes us wonder at the charac-
ter of matter rather than explains its nature. The doctrine
of probabilities is but a murmur of laws speeding on their
courses in cycles more vast than we can comprehend. Our
whole science is but a faint outline of what science will be
to the generations which come after us, and the science of
the future, what will it be in comparison with the realities
of creation as God knows them t What are the kingdoms
of matter to the kingdom of men, and what the king-
dom of men to the gorgeous empire of the many-kinded
angels ^

We must learn to look at creatures from God's point of
view ; and we have seen that His own perfections involve
the importance of creatures in His sight. If we lay this
view aside, our theology will detach itself more and more
from the mind and movement of the living generations, and
so will abdicate that sovereignty over other sciences, which
is not only its lawful heritage, but is now more than ever
within its grasp. Better times are coming ; yet these times
also are very good. All things considered, the times are
miraculously good. Their very darkness is in favour of
divine things, and the light of all times is already both the
produce and the property of that which is divine amongst
us. As theology is the science of all others which takes its
stand upon the past, so there is no science which has so
many duties to the future. It is a living science, not a
lifeless standard. It is a life of itself, not a mere measure
of other lives; a limit certainly, yet a limit enlarging all
other limitations. The vast circuit and wide expansion of
scientific discovery is an augury of a yet more magnificent
theology, one which will enable us to envy less those

286 SOUL AND BODY.

scholastic glories in whose sunset we are living. The world
of mind may have glacial periods analogous to the geological
one ; but in this respect they differ, that they are mostly
short, and look darker at a distance than they were when
they were present.

There are nights in the world's history ; but they are more
like eclipses than nights, because they are so brief ; and
moreover there is light enough in their darkness to see with.
To a man who lies wakeful, unless he be ill also, the morning
always comes suddenly, and earlier than it seemed due. So
will it be with that better future of the Church and world,
for which we are all looking somewhat wearily, but quite
undoubtingly. Even now does not the future at times dart
into our very present with a kind of frightening consolation,
and break upon our ears in silent hours of inward listening
like a song of joy, and of such joy as is not the joy of our
own day, but a joy surprised with its own exceeding joyful-
nessl We hear evermore the tread of the future, like the
footsteps of a benefactor coming to us in our hour of need.
The times are good, and on no account to be complained of ;
but in a wicked world all good times are always better for
what they promise, than for what they give. They are times
singular and apart, and visibly burdened with a mission, as
all good times seem to be to those who live in them, and
think. We cannot think without hoping. Thought in
God's world is hope, because the world is God's. It is a
bright gift, for others' good as well for our own, when we
can understand and welcome the future, while it is yet
only pushing its fibres under the present, and so to un-
loving minds seems rather like a disturbance than a quiet
blessing.

But let us return from this digression. We may think
for long of the riches of God in the possession of creatures
before we exhaust the thought ; and when we have thought

SOUL AND BODY. 287

it out as far as we can, it will lift us so high that we shall
be able to take a more worthy view of His essential glory
and His own intrinsic plenitude, a view more worthy than
we ever dreamed was possible. A high view of creation
does for our idea of God, what the true doctrine of our
Blessed Lady does. For every measurable height to which
it raises her, it raises our appreciation of Him immeasurably.
We find God everywhere, in our low thoughts as well as in
our high. But it is the inevitable result of mean views of
creation to give us poor views of God. Yet mean views
are tempting because they are easy, and because they
dispense our minds from embracing so wide a circle of
intelligence.

God possesses wonderful creatures in this creation, of
which we know something. In other distant outlying
creations He may possess creatures yet more wonderful But
nowhere does He possess any creature which is to compare
with the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, the type and cause of
all creation. It is this Sacred Humanity, the Soul and
Body of the Incarnate Word, which we are to consider in
the present Chapter, and the remarks which have paved the
way to it will be found not to have been irrelevant to the
purpose. All parts of creation influence all other parts.
The most distant star tells in some way upon the most lowly
wild-flower on our insignificant planet. But no part of
creation is so vastly influential as the Sacred Humanity of
our Blessed Lord, the Humanity which is above the angels,
and adored by them. Take away the Church, which is
built upon it, abrogate the Sacraments, which are His own
personal residence and agency amongst us, remove Him from
His mediatorial throne in heaven, abolish the Four Gospels
and the rest of the New Testament, take out of language,
literature, and thought all the ideas which are growths or
prophecies of the Incarnation, extract out of false religions

288 SOUL AND BODY,

all the semblances and counterfeits of the Incarnation, take
away from sorrow, and gladness, and strife, even the mere
material pictures of Jesus and His Mother, and would not
the extinguishing of the light of the sun be radically a less
change, in effect a milder revolution 1 The Sacred Humanity
is a creature the uprooting of which would be the unbinding
of all creation.

Let us attentively consider the influence of the Sacred
Humanity at this very hour, at any given hour, while we
write or while we read. The vast heaven, where the Vision
of God is unveiled, is all thrilling with its influence. The
huge circumferences of heaven's various spheres are trem-
bling with the life and pulses of the Sacred Humanity. It
has unveiled that Vision, unveiled it even to the angels.
At this moment it is peopling heaven with continual fresh
multitudes, even of infants, earth's infants, who enter there
through it magnificent, wise, full-grown, Christ-like men,
who through the marvellous waters of baptism have pierced
the earth, grown, budded, bloomed, borne fruit, and garnered
themselves in heaven in less than an hour perhaps of time.
Redeemed penitents are entering there, with long inward
histories all full of the mysterious action of the Sacred
Humanity. Perfect love has leaped at once a minute ago,
this minute also, and the next minute will do so, and all
minutes, from earth straight to heaven ; but it had hold cf
the hand of Jesus while it leaped. Long sojourners in
purgatory have just arrived upon the bright shores to begin
their eternal youth, miracles of salvation, hard-won trophies
of the Precious Blood, whose drops made those fires
medicinal even w^hile it allayed them. Look at the un-
wearied angels, upright spirits, beaming in their magnifi-
cence ! They are the subjects of the Sacred Humanity.
That Human Nature is the cause of their being in heaven,
the fountain as well as the occasion of all their graces, the

SOUL AND BODY. 289

means as well as the sustaining of their prolific glory. There
is not an angel in those burning rings, but Man made him
what he was, enabled him to do what he did, and placed
him royally and securely there.

The Sacred Humanity is the actual light of the heavenly
Jerusalem, whatever that may mean, and it doubtless means
a thousand things. It is both sun and moon, and other sun
and moon are needed not because of it It is the light in
which the Vision is seen. The manifold functions of light
to terrestrial life are but so many faint foreshadowings of
what the light of the Lamb is to that grand, deep, broad
life above. How fair in that light, meek, distinct, yet in
a jewelled blaze of spiritual splendour, a very unspeakable
starry heaven of itself, rises Mary's throne ! Yet she
was placed there by the Sacred Humanity. The Sacred
Humanity is the whole account of her, of whom the
highest theology on earth can give no account that may
content us. Throughout all those vast courts of blessed-
ness living that dread life before the unaverted Face of
the Most Holy Trinity, a life of overwhelming, blissful
fire, there is no adequate worship of the Blessed Trinity,
except by the Sacred Humanity. The souls of men make
lowly music there. The spirits of angels tune louder lyres
with a more daring inspiration. The being of Mary throws
up soft ocean waves to the foot of the throne, which come
so near, yet fall short so infinitely. The Sacred Heart
alone worships the Threefold Majesty in adorable perfection,
by virtue of its union with the Word. Heaven therefore
is not imaginable without that Human Nature enthroned
and worshipped there.

H we look at earth, we find the action of the Sacred
Humanity no less potent, no less universal, no less indis-
pensable. Can the grace, which there is upon the earth
this day, be measured by any one but God ? In how many

T

290 SOUL AND BODY.

millions of souls, whether in the Church or slowly drawing
towards it, is not grace at work, manifold and multiform,
wedding itself to all manner of, opposite occasions, steering
all manner of diverging circumstances, adapting itself to
how many varieties of fortune and position ! Here with a
sort of feeble beauty it is preluding in a heathen soul, or
hiddenly sweetening the bitterness of misbelief. Here it
is faintly prophecying over the soul, softly as a cloud-
shadow rests upon the lea, of some supernatural vocation
which is gathering to a head all day, like the stately pre-
parations of a summer storm. There it is fighting with sin,
clamouring in the soul, yet inaudible, striking hard but in
the fury of battle all unfelt. There again it is keeping at
high-tide the calm fulness of grace in some holy practised
soul. Elsewhere it is coming in various sevenfold array to
those Sacraments, which are streaming, and rushing, and
glancing, and resounding all day and night in the Church,
like the mountain cataract in the woods. Elsewhere again
its name is legion, and it is trooping to the death-beds of
men. In darkness and in light, upon bad and good, in
the safe ark of the Church or amidst those drowning in the
outer deluge, grace is at work, even beyond the suspicion of
those of us who deem of it most liberally ; and the single
sufficient fountain of all this grace is the Sacred Humanity,
whether the grace scatter itself ubiquitous over the outlying
world, or be almost irresistibly concentrated in the Church
and Sacraments.

Neither are the effects of this singular and pre-eminent
Human Nature less wonderful, although they are less im-
portant, on the mind of earth. The Incarnation has been
built up into the whole fabric of our present literature, even
in its most irreligious parts. The commonest notions of
what is divine have taken their shape from it. The sickly
eulogies of a misty, progressive, unindividualised humanity

SOUL AND BODY. 291

have caught from it whatever in them is not mere sound
or insane affectation. Every tenth stone at least in the palace
of literature is an idea of the Incarnation. It is the novelty
and freshness of all that the modern world has thought, and
sung, and said. Without it unbelief would not know how
to make itself attractive for an hour. Art lives by it, and
without it would descend into a pagan copyist to-morrow.
Take away the Incarnation, and we may doubt whether
art would ever recover itself from the abyss of unhelpful
antiquarianism into which it would fall. Systems of philo-
sophy either embody the Incarnation as an element in what
they affirm, or they take their shape and consistence from
their antagonism to it. In no way and by no manner of
device can they clear themselves of it, and exist and utter
themselver calmly and loftily as if it had never been.
Politics borrow from it even while they are limiting its
action ; and diplomacy, just in proportion as it is inwardly
hostile, grows outwardly respectful. That enthroned Human
Nature is the keystone of every arch which sustains modem
civilisation. Any sort of glory the world could attain to
without it now would be but the glory of a ruin. Is there
any province of the human mind, in which we could now
do without it and the congenial ideas to which it has given
birth? No present is possible, which the past has not
begotten, and the present is the only road to the future.
Hence the Sacred Humanity has become simply indispens-
able and inevitable to every possible development and most
unthought of revolution of the world's life, even in spheres
the most remote from trutli and from religion.

The Sacred Humanity is the king of earth, and is actually
resident among us in countless palaces. It leads a hidden
life, one most fruitful department of which consists of
nothing else than a continual averting of judgments and
calamities from the whole race, whose nature has been

292 SOUL AND BODY.

iionoTired by the Word's assumption of it. It holds the
elements in control, and renders their might more benignant
than their laws would have led us to anticipate. It bridles
the earthquake, and tames the pestilence. It keeps men
safe on an earth which is always quivering and dipping,
turns the wild floods at their most perilous angles, guides
into the soft unhurt earth thousands of thunderbolts which
would have scathed life, or limb, or property. It beautifies
the rough ways of death, even while it bids us tread them
as a punishment from which there can be no dispensation.
There is not perhaps one human heart from which it has
not averted many unknown yet once imminent sorrows,
and which it has not saved from pains of the flesh which
would have been harder to bear than we like now to think.
We do not know what we owe to Mass, and the Blessed
Sacrament, of comfort, peace, and unharmed common life.
Last of all, and this would fill a volume, this Sacred
Humanity is itself the love of earth, and the magnet of
all earth's holy love, causing life to be softer and more
bearable, making all that is noble in us divine, ennobling
what would else be mean, and just when hfe seems coming
to a point when it must become uuendurable, opening a
way and letting us down into some sudden bed of roses,
which have no thorns, and are so far from enervating the
soul that they fortify it as with some heavenly elixir.

Beneath the earth is that strange, almost unimaginable
Church of the suffering souls, a work of divine art, a
creation of love which is never at fault for means to secure
its ends, yet not supplementary, as nothing in creation is,
but part of the great merciful design for the discipline and
success of man. Over that strange life of fiery sufi'ering
and of assured love, blended in equal and equable inten-
sities, are cast the spells of the Sacred Humanity. No-
where is gloom so soft, nowhere are shadows so beautiful,

SOUL AND BODY. 293

as in the land of purgatory. There are few of the redeemed
to whom the geography of that valley of expectation must
not one day become familiar. But it is through the Sacred
Humanity that we enter there. Jesus is our judge as Man,
not as the Word ; and it is at His bidding, almost antici-
pated by our own love of perfect purity; that we enter
there. His sentence is the gateway by which we gain
access to those fires of the predestinate, a happy gateway
to a land of pain, because implying a sentence of immortal
happiness.

We shall have seen the Sacred Humanity before we enter
there. A momentary intellectual vision of it will have
passed before us, momentary, yet so engraven on our souls
that we can never forget it, even if our pathway of fire liea
before us in perspective for centuries of earth's slow time,
It is in our Blessed Lord's Sacred Humanity, as the Head
of creation, that the communion of saints is consummated ;
Jind it is by that communion that any help can find its road
to our souls while they are imprisoned there, the captives
of patiently impatient hope. It is by the satisfactions
which He made in His Human Nature, that all those holy
souls are gradually relieved and finally released : for even
our own satisfactions would have been no satisfactions if
His had not gone before. It is His Human Blood, freshly
outpoured in the daily Mass, which quenches the bitter
flames. It is the second vision of His Sacred Humanity
for which every soul in all that soft and soundless realm
of tranquil martyrdom is craving at this very hour. Pur-
gatory is a province of our Lord's Kingdom which seems
privileged to stand in peculiarly close relations to His
Humanity.

Even in hell that gentle Humanity is active and energetic.
Hell itself is but the consequence of the rejection of the
Incarnation. There are none there but those who with

294 SOUL AND BODY.

assiduous perversity have placed themselves there. There
are none there whose going there it was not the intention
and the wish of the Sacred Humanity to hinder. There
are none there, who had not with unprofitable valour to
gain a miserable conquest over Jesus in order to get there.
His mere Name receives there endlessly a kind of horrified
worship, the unwelcome tribute of a terror that is not
beautified by hope. Lucifer became the mean king of hell,
a baffled inglorious tyrant, because he would not keep his
glorious throne in heaven as a vassal king to the Babe of
Bethlehem. It was as Man that Jesus, over whose shadow
the miserable angel had stumbled in heaven, conquered
hell's king on earth, and disjointed the compactness of his
kingdom beneath the earth. All the clocks, that strike the
hours on earth, mark some new victory of the Sacred
Humanity over the rebel spirit. Each grace given is a
blow struck Each Sacrament administered is a fortress
taken. Each mercy granted is a gain for heaven. Each
intervention of deathbed absolution is an actually robbing
hell of what seems by earthly justice to be its due. Nay,
down in the pit itself the Sacred Humanity is sensibly felt,
like a throbbing heart, in the intolerable darkness. The
skirts of His love trail over the fires, while the outcasts
curse it as it passes. All the sufi'erings there, faithfully,
eloquently as in their immeasurable intensity they ex-
press the grandeur of the divine justice, are less terrible
than they ought to be, because of the merits of that
super-angelic Human Nature. For that Nature, ubiquitous
in its benignant power, permitted master as it were of
the resources of the Divinity, lengthens the slanting beams
of the divine compassion, and prolongs them under the
green earth even till they silver somewhat of that outer
darkness.

May we be forgiven, if we say a word or two of other

SOUL AND BODY. 295

w^orlds of which we know nothing 1 Their possibilities at
least will help to complete our idea of the empire of the
Word's Humanity. The question of the inhabitation of
the other planets, or of the distant central stars, by reason-
able creatures, is one which it does not appear likely that
science will ever settle, and on which revelation has not
authentically spoken. Minds, which love analogy, find a
difficulty in conceiving that all the orbs which night braids
upon her forehead, and yet which are still invisibly looking
down upon us through the white light of day, should be
meant for nothing more than the lamps of a Chinese feast,
or a colossal game of material laws, and a puzzle of inter-
changing attractions and repulsions. Gigantic wildernesses
of matter, untenanted by moral agents, appear out of keep-
ing with the analogies of creation. On the other hand,
minds, to whom theological truth is almost the only
attractive truth, and, rightly considered, is properly itself
all truth, are met by inferences from the mystery of the
Incarnation, which seem to them irresistible, and yet which
will not fit in with the notion of this world, the scene of
the Incarnation, being but one, and a very insignificant
one, in a crowd of reasonable worlds.

But the man of science must be less bigoted, and leave
more room for fresh analogies, such as perhaps he has
never dreamed of yet : and the theologian must beware
of narrowness, the disease to which he is most subject, and
must eschew that miserable haste of little minds to close
questions which legitimate authority has left wide open.
A theologian above other men should be one who can take
into his large heart with gonial sympathy, rather than with
critical distrust, the whole of the century in which he
lives. Surely it would be a downright grief to any think-
ing and heaven-hoping man to dream for one moment
that any, the least, of God's mysteries had room enough

296 SOUL AND BODY.

in our widest systems, and was not a thousand times
bigger truth than it seems to those whose intelligence
magnifies it most. The doctrine of the Incarnation is in
no peril from the inhabitants of a million other worlds.
God's centres are different from ours, and the Sacred
Humanity, assumed on earth, would remain the centre
of all those numberless creations, just as it is now the
Centre, Head, King, Type, and Cause of the angelical
creation, which needs not a material home at all, much
less has any necessary connection with the matter of this
particular planet.

The dogma of the Incarnation is not then committed
to any view upon the plurality of worlds; while at the
same time the scriptural revelation of the existence of
the angels, and their manifold relations to men, may breed
in the theologian's mind a presumption that the silence
of the Scripture upon beings, who, if they exist, must be
with the angels and ourselves of the one family of Christ,
is against the notion that other orbs are yet inhabited by
reasonable beings. Nevertheless, as I have already sug-
gested in another work, the modern discoveries of geology
seem at once to permit the theologian to take the view
to which he is perhaps most inclined, and also to meet
the common objection on the other side of the unlikelihood
of so many huge bright worlds being left untenanted.
Many writers have argued, as if those who held the other
planets to be unpeopled now must hold also that they
would remain unpeopled ; and hence much fallacy and
confusion have arisen. To repeat what I have said else-
where, we have no right to conclude as certain that the
creation of rational beings took place all at one time.
The corporeal and incorporeal creations were simultaneous ;
but not all corporeal or all incorporeal species. Indeed we
know that the angels belonged to an elder creation than our-

SOUL AND BODY, 297

selves. Man's creation was subsequent to the creation of the
very matter out of which God formed his body. So that the
only instance, with which we are acquainted, would favour
the supposition that God, in His adorable love of order,
might begin creation in one spot, and go on to others,
as He has done with angels and men, and with men in
their various dispensations. After the angels He came to
men and began with earth. There is no intrinsic unlikeli-
hood of His beginning with our system, and with this
particular planet in our system, which can be set for a
moment against what we know at all events to be a fact,
that God chose to take the particular nature of man, who
is the inhabitant of this planet, and to choose this orb as
the scene of His Incarnation, and the locality of His
redeeming sacrifice. From this orb, and from this system.
He may proceed to others, and so spread reasonable life
and worship through starry space.

The old argument, that it is unlikely such bright worlds
should not now be furnishing God's glory with reasonable
worship, might just as much have been urged against the
unpeopled earth through all those interminable epochs,
during which geology thinks it can show it to us as with
incredible slowness ripening for the habitation of men.
We cannot talk much of analogies, when we know but
one case. Yet the one case of earth, as interpreted by
geology, discloses God to us as conducting His designs
in creation by a circuitous series of preparations of such
gigantic dimensions as almost to unsettle our belief in the
sobriety of science.

But, whatever comes of these speculations, if the other
worlds were or are inhabited by moral agents, the proba-
bility is as irresistible, as a probability can be, of their being
under the Sacred Humanity of Jesus as their Head. They
would belong to Him in an especial way as the Word,

29« SOUL AND BODY.

through the Word's relation to creatures ; and it is surely
unlikely and nnanalogous that He should be to some worlds
as incarnate, and to some as not incarnate, particularly when
we consider that He is Head of the Angels in His Human
Nature, and that they among themselves are in reality not
one family in their nature, in the same sense as men are,
but an immense number of species, one possibly differing
more from another, than a stellar creature would differ from
us, or we from a supposed inhabitant of another planet.

Creatures in other worlds would probably be created in a
state of grace, like the two creations of men and angels. It
looks as if it were a part of God's magnificence that it should
be so. But grace would hardly come from the Word in His
one Nature now that He has two, when it did not do so, as
we think the more probable opinion, when His Human
Nature was only foreseen. If these worlds, thus created in
a state of grace, are unfallen, they are probably standing
upright by the grace of the Incarnate Word. If they are
fallen, and not restored, whether the fall was partial as with
the angels, or universal as with men by their descent, the
Incarnation probably would mingle with the fall, as it did
in the case of the angels. If they are fallen and restored,
for the same reasons we should believe that they were
restored by Him. The locality of His Bloodshedding on
this particular planet would be no objection, as the angels,
although not redeemed by Him, as either not needing or not
being allowed ledemption, have nevertheless gained by His
merits. They who meditate much on the Unity of God,
and such meditation is the marked characteristic of those
who have an especial devotion to the mystery of the Most
Holy Trinity, will almost daily see new probabilities that
the family of the glorified would be one. Poles further
apart than men and angels could hardly have to be brought
together. Yet they are brought together under one Head,

SOUL AND BODY. 299

and it is in His Human Nature that the Word is Head of
both. If then the marvellous work of the Hypostatic Union
is adequate for this, why multiply Headships, and so lose
the unity of the family, which is the grand shadow of the
Unity of God ?

We have hinted at these speculations, not as if they were
of importance in themselves, but as showing that the idea of
the Incarnation, as here brought forward, finds no difficulties
in those problems which have been started by the scientific
controversies of the day. Thus wherever we look, whether
with upturned heart and eye we blind ourselves by looking
into heaven, or range through the manifold kingdoms of
earth, or explore the holy hospitals of purgatory, or venture
to hang over the dread abyss of the condemned, or imagine
theologies for worlds from which we are cut off by gulfs of
impassable, unnavigable space, everywhere we see the Sacred
Humanity to be the Primal Creature of God, to be what no
other creature is or can be, and to contain and imply all
other creatures in itself with a certain sovereign eminence,
which belongs to it in right of its eternal predestination.

There are fertile times when a man's thoughts float out
from him, like the gushings of his life, becoming part of
truth rather than expressing it, and making the mind a
worshipper rather than a teacher. It is in such seasons that
we see how all things are theology, and how in it all other
sciences regain themselves rather than melt away. It is in
such seasons that the chambers of space open out to us, their
far-off walls dissolving into clearest ether, and we behold the
vast empire of the Sacred Humanity running out with its
glorious promontories into the infinite life of God, where we
had never dared to dream. It is in such seasons that we
hear the invisible, although we cannot see it ; and thence-
forth the next world haunts us here with a teasing like that
i)i an unrecovered thought.

300 SOUL AND BODY,

It is the vision of the Sacred Humanity which the
sick world wants this hour. We want daring men, men
made daring by depth of erudition as well as by breadth
of sympathy. We need men who are audacious, because
they are humble. We seek for men, or if so be a man,
who shall wed all the sciences with theology, who shall
reconcile faith and reason in one large lucid philosophy,
and who shall teach the nations how the Church can
dilate herself to the size of all the social questions which
80 vex humanity. O mistaken generation, that would
worship power, not beholding that such a worship is but
an insincere confession of our weakness, and therefore of
all seeming heroisms the most unhelpful and imbecile !
There are some men who are all light, not so much
because they see so much more than other men, as because
other men see so much more in them, and by their means
see also so much beyond them. It is such men as these
that God is waiting to give us, when we have grown wise
enough to lose all hope in ourselves.

Full then of reverence for the Person of the Eternal
Word, let us now come to adore His holy Flesh and His
glorious Human Soul. Strict theology must attend us on
our way ; and while we search, we must adore ; and while
we adore, we must also search. In matters of doctrinal
devotion false reverence is a common form of indevout
impatience. We must be upon our guard against this. God
gives us the Incarnation that we may exercise our thought
and love upon it. It is hardly possible for us to be too
minute in our devotions to the Sacred Humanity, so as
to implant the reality of it most deeply in our souls. Our
minuteness is authorised by the example of the Church,
or rather the Church beckons us to follow her example in
this respect. The feasts which she celebrates, such as those
of the Sacred Heart, the Precious Blood, the Five Wounds?

SOUL AND BODY. 301

the Agony in the Garden, the Crown of Thorns, and
others, and then the devotions, which she not only permits,
but indulgences, are patterns which she puts before us,
not so much to limit our devotions to those, as to point
the way to others.

There is an essential irreverence, and a tendency, which
is at least implicitly heretical, to fastidiousness in this
matter, which we shall have to consider also in the
Treatise on the Passion. It is an irreverence similar to
that false devotion which the prophet rebuked in Achaz,
when he refused to ask a sign of God, though God
through His prophet bade him do so ; the irreverence of
not investigating the signs which God gives us for the
purpose of being investigated, as if we knew better than
He, and were more delicate and circumspect in our
operations. The mere fact of the Sacred Humanity is a
revelation in its sole self. We cannot think now what
we should have thought of God without it. He Himself
would have seemed different to us, because we should not
have had even the half-light we now have regarding the
mystery of creation. We know that an uncreating God
would have been equally adorable with a creating God ;
but the worshipfulness of the creatureless God would have
been simply unimaginable, a possibility lighted only from
His own side, inasmuch as none of His Glory would have
been projected in the shape of creatures to light it from
the other.

But it is not only new ideas of God which we receive
from the Sacred Humanity ; it is also a positive way to
Him, an approach which may be trodden, which must indis-
pensably be trodden, even by such souls as know not they
are treading it, like the straggling pilgrims who reach God
spent and wearied and surprised out of the countries of the
heathen. Out of it, moreover, come new kinds of union

302 SOUL AND BODY.

between the soul and its Creator, unions such as occupy
mystical theology, and many of them of such a sacramental
character as to have been unknown even to the Hebrew
saints. Hence there is no minuteness about Jesus, which
does not concern us. For every conceivably varying contact
with Him is the communication of some new grace. It is
itself some new method of transformation into Him. His
innumerable mysteries are compounds of many mysteries,
and the far-reaching glass of love can resolve them into
almost countless worlds of distinct beauty, separate power,
and individual significance. Of each of them it is true that
it is not merely a picture but a power, not a beauty only,
but a grace also.

We must look upon the Sacred Humanity as a world by
itself, the head of all worlds, their pattern and their cause.
The stars fly upon their silent courses. Some law, or some
complexity of laws, whether it be those already discovered,
or something simpler and more universal the discovery of
which awaits science further on, enables orbs of immense
ponderousness to wheel through the slightly resisting space,
as if it were in grooves of ice, while space is mercifully made
soundless, lest all creatures should be killed by the roaring
and clattering and booming of all these worlds in their
tremendous velocity. All these worlds are sustained by
God. All are supported by Him on the three pillars, which
are but one pillar, of His essence, presence, and power. But
the Sacred Humanity is differently sustained. It is imme-
diately supported by One of the Three Divine Persons. It
rests wholly on the Person of the Word in a way in which
no other creature can rest on a Divine Person. It has not
even the support of a human personality of its own. By a
glorious privation it lacks this natural support of its nature,
while by a miraculous union, transcending all unities what-
soever, except the Unity of God, it is united to the Person

SOUL AND BODY. 303

of the Word. It is this Ilumanity, this compound of a
human soul and a human body, thus lying in unspeakable
repose on the Person of the Word, which we are now to
consider more closely and more in detail than we have
done before.

But where shall we get nearest to it? From what point
of view shall we be able most clearly to see those marvellous
operations which it so studiously conceals ? Yet, while it
conceals them, is it not also inviting us to the research of its
secret wonders? When we desired to contemplate the
Divinity of the Babe of Bethlehem, we let Mary lay Him
down upon the sands beneath the acacia of the wilderness :
whither shall we go now to behold the operations of His
Sacred Humanity ? It is clear that we must look at it from
more than one point of view. We must go and live with
Him in the Holy House of Nazareth, a sanctuary so saturated
with His long presence, so inefifaceably consecrated by His
miraculous years of hidden holiness, that God has set it up,
for the present on the Adriatic shore, as a wonder-working
tabernacle, a living House of Grace, in the midst of the
Church, His larger House of Grace, until the end of time.
Through the months of the four seasons, through the days
of the week with their varying occupations, through the
hours of the day from the pearly dawn until the starry dusk,
through the quiet watches of the nights of sleep and prayer,
we must familiarise ourselves with our Lord's Hidden Years
at Nazareth. His real growth of Body, perceptible to us
from time to time, would seem a worshipful mystery, when
we considered who He was. Here in autumn He is lifting
weights, which in spring He could not have lifted. The
light is changed in His eye, because the maturity of years is
deepening it. The tone of His voice is graver, because the
power of years is toning it. The voice of the Eternal Word
broke, like the voices of other boys. His Mother's ways

304 SOUL AND BODY.

come up upon the surface of His bodily gestures, and
surprise us into tears. His limbs are longer, thicker,
broader. The colour of His hair becomes darker. With
years the beard of manhood browns His chin. We cannot
watch this common growth of His human Body without
adoring ; for all proofs of the reality of His Human Nature
are always new, always penetrate into the deepest recesses
of the soul, and always take our love and worship by
surprise.

But the seeming growth of His Soul is yet more wonder-
ful. He appears more holy than He was a month ago.
Grace looks as if it had developed in Him. It does not
seem merely as if circumstances had opened wider fields for
His grace, or had conferred upon them more advantageous
positions. But it seems as if He grew in grace. The very
seeming of such a thing is adorable, the more adorable
because we know it is but seeming. His grace never grew
from the first moment of His Conception. But greater
wisdom gives grace more liberty. Does He then seem
more holy, simply because He has grown wiser 1 But He
has not grown wiser. This also is but a mysterious sem-
blance, as we shall see presently ; but here again the
semblance is of itself adorable. Nevertheless He makes
acquisitions, and this is truly a growth, yet in Him hardly
a growth. Rather, it is one of His loving condescensions.
He gains no new knowledge. He does not grow in science.
He only becomes master by acquisition of the same science
of which He was master before in higher ways. He knows
certain things, such things as life's experience is capable of
teaching, in two ways, instead of knowing them in one way.
He has now a double knowledge of them, an acquired
knowledge in addition to the infused knowledge He had
before. But this learning by experience is a marvellous
mystery in Him.

SOUL AND BODY. 305

Then in that life of Nazareth how much is there which
we cannot see ! Every moment, waking or sleeping, that
Sacred Humanity is the scene of endless and most heavenly
operations by virtue of its union with the Word At all
hours the Divine Nature is sending forth a power which
as it were oozes down into all the faculties of the Soul and
all the senses of the Body, interpenetrating them all with
singular virtue and with exceeding glory, now as it were
giving free course to its love of the inferior nature, and
now marvellously suspending such of its excellent effects
as are incompatible with the suffering or humbled state in
which our Lord at the time vouchsafed to be. The secret
life of the simple union of the Two Natures in the Divine
Person is a vast series of wonders, whose scene is the House
of Nazareth, but whose grandeur outshines that of all
creation beside.

At times too, as if the better to realise the deep lying
marvels and shy magnificence of Nazareth, we must fly to
the summit of Tabor, and anticipate the day of the Trans-
figuration. There we behold those things blooming, which
at Nazareth were kept jealously closed in the modest-seem-
ing sheaths of the most trivial actions. Yet in this respect
there is more comparison than contrast between Nazareth
and Tabor. The mountain-top was itself a privacy, and the
refulgence a " holy house " of light which screened Him
as effectually as the sacred walls of Nazareth. Even the
manifestations of God are shrouded in secrecy. Yet the
Transfiguration was especially a manifestation of the
splendour of His Sacred Humanity. It was not a change
which came over it, nor a gift which was then and there
granted to it, nor a mere external ratification of its honour
from heaven. It was the outward blooming of that which
had always been within, and had been ready to unfold its
astonishing blossoms at any hour in the privacy of Nazaretli,

u

3o6 SOUL AND BODY.

There could be no strife between the two Natures of oui
Blessed Lord.

Nevertheless we can hardly bring home to ourselves under
any other figure their relation to each other during the days
of His humiliation. It was as if the Human Nature were
resisting the communications of the Divine. It was as if
the glories of the Divine Nature were being muffled in the
imperfections of the Human. It was as if the one Nature
were getting the upper hand of the other alternately. So
we should express, with obvious inaccuracy, the appearance
of several of the mysteries of the Three-and-Thirty Years.
The Transfiguration, under this figure, would be a visible
strife of the two Natures manifested to a chosen few*
Except in the case of His miraculous works of mercy, and
those need hardly be excepted, it was perhaps in all His
years before the Resurrection the solitary victory of the
Divine Nature over the Human, the single instance in
which the veils of humiliation were burned away, and the
Human Nature persuaded to display those gifts which be-
longed to it in virtue of its union with the Word. Habi-
tually it kept its own proper glory suppressed, as if it were
a slumbering volcano within Him ; and now on the top of
Tabor a momentary eruption of its splendour was permitted.
Yet it was all in such secrecy that it almost seems, we may
reverently say it, as if it were less for the sake of the few
spectators, less to prepare with compassionate artifice the
weakness of Peter and James and John for the Passion,
than to ease the love which His Divine Nature had for the
Human, and as it were bribe it to keep quiet during the
derelictions of the Passion. We must gaze upon it now
that we may remember what that natural state was to
which the Child, and then the Boy, of Nazareth was always
tending, and which in His love of suffering and of us He
was always purposely suppressing.

SOUL AND BODY. 307

We shall not also understand Nazareth unless we com-
pare the Sacred Humanity in the Holy House with the
Sacred Humanity in its proper place in Heaven. In the
hour of His Ascension heaven became a new place. It was
not like what it had been before. There was the same
Vision of the Most Holy in the quietude of its immutable
magnificence. There were the same songs of the ancient
kingdoms of the angels, swelled perhaps by the voices of
the little human multitude that was newly come, and varied
somewhat it might be in their doxologies by the presence
of Mary's Son. Yet this could not change heaven. Never-
theless it was completely changed, changed by a greater
change than creation was upon nothingness. This change
was in the presence of the Sacred Humanity.

It may be expressed in a word, but it is a word lying
far beyond the compass of our understanding. Here was
God adoring God. Here was a finite nature out of which
infinite worship was streaming. Here was a created life
which was in a most awful way a double of the Holy
Trinity. Here was a human Soul wrapped in the flames
of the Divinity, and blazing there unharmed and insepar-
ably one with the Divine Person. Here was an unveiled
eminence of Soul with operations so transcendent as to
inspire the highest angels with awe. Here was a dazzling
effulgence of Body in such an inexpressible shining of
material beauty as to light up the almost boundless world,
wherein God has been pleased to locate the Beatific Vision
of Himself. All this is summed up, and depths after
depths far beyond it indicated, and to our blindness only
momentarily illuminated, by the fact that here now for
the first time in heaven was God worshipping God, the
Go-equal adoring the Co-equal. I believe the glory of
the Sacred Humanity in heaven to be simply incompre-
hensible even by the highest angels. Yet no change had

3o8 SOUL AND BODY.

come over it since Nazareth. The Resurrection was no
transformation. The Ascension gave it nothing more than
a local throne. Like the sensitive blossoms which close
when but a hand's-breadth of cloud floats over the sun, so
the Sacred Humanity concealed altogether this intrinsic
glory in the Holy House of Nazareth, with its flower-leaves
closed in upon themselves under the chill shade of humilia-
tion ; yet was it only so kept down by the might of a love
which was vehement enough to redeem a world. Heaven
has made no change in that marvellous blossom ; but earth,
before the dear glory left it, painted five red marks upon
its snowy leaves.

But let us venture to look more minutely into this
Sacred Humanity. We cannot picture to ourselves the
likeness of a soul. The spiritual lineaments of our own
immortal being are strictly unimaginable by us, much
more so the lineaments of the Soul of Jesus. Yet theology
teaches us no little about its operations and its eminence.
As we have seen before, the beauty of God, that fountain
in Him so little honoured in the present day, but in
which the greatest minds of old were wont to feed their
deep conceptions of His majesty, is as it were the abyss
out of which the divine wisdom omnipotently evokes such
devices as shall satisfy His insatiable goodness. It is
thus we would express the relations of these Attributes
to each other. There is a perfect facility in all the divine
operations. He would not be God, if it were not so.
Indeed facility is too difficult a word, inasmuch as it
expresses the littleness of resistance, and therefore implies
that there is some resistance ; just as we speak of God
choosing, though the word choice implies comparison, and
at least a momentary hesitation, neither of which we can
admit in God. This superfacility, to coin a word, of the
divine operations, is something beyond the powers of oui

SOUL AND BODY. 309

language, and out of reach of comparisons drawn from
created things. So that when we come to speculate upon
any of God's greater works, most of all His singular works,
such as the Soul and Body of Jesus, we almost uncon-
sciously express to ourselves in the silence of our con-
ception the magnitude of the divine work, by imagining
the shadow of an effort even on the part of omnipotence.
It is one of the necessary infirmities of our minds that
we should do so.

Now if we conceive the almost infinity of space, the
vast capabilities of the elements, the terrific ponderous-
ness of matter, the huge orbs of millions of suns, the
slinging and poising of these immense yet arrowy systems
of worlds, and the complicated paths of all those rushing
systems in their irresistible velocities, to have cost God
no more effort than it costs the frosty air on a still
autumnal morning to loosen a single golden leaf from off
the tree, and let it waver down upon the silent stream
below ; and if we add to this, the unmeasured realms of
spirit, populous with angelic species, each angel perhaps
being worth as a divine work all the systems of the
midnight sky, and still suppose them all to have flowed
out of God's Hand without its stirring, as a thing falls
from the hand of a man asleep; yet when we come to
think of the creation of the Soul of Jesus, at once, to our
imperfect ideas, the divine wisdom seems busy thinking,
the divine goodness intently choosing, the divine beauty
studiously reflecting itself, the divine power gathering itself
up for the effort implied in the grandeur, the eminence,
and the singularity of the work in which it is about to be
engaged. This is our way of putting the matter to our-
selves, untrue in itself, and yet helping us towards the
truth. For this creation, the Soul of Jesus, is lovelier than
the intelligences of the angels ; it is vaster than sidereal

3IO SOUL AND BODY.

space ; it is more various than material nature. Or it
would be more true to say that it united in itself and
unutterably surpassed all the actual magnificences of all
other creations, whether Mary, angels, men, matter, or new
creations yet to be. We can say almost all things of it.
We can only not say of it that creative omnipotence so
exhausted itself in it, that now it cannot equal or surpass
it Perhaps in one sense no better soul was strictly possible,
because no fitter one is possible. For the optimism of the
divine works consists rather in the eminence of their
fitness than in their absolute excellence.

Let us imagine this Soul to ourselves as a world of light,
with its shores and waters, its woods and mountains, all
fashioned of the purest glowing light, transparent through-
out the whole of its immense orb, full of variety, full of
softly flashing depths, unpartitioned yet unconfused, a
translucent crystal world, seen through on every side, and
on every side through its calm rich light God is seen, the
beautiful Godhead, self-disclosed by excess of beauty and
self-obliterated by excess of light. Without, it is piled
high with intolerable sublimities of light whose pinnacles
are hidden in the lightnings of the Eternal Throne.
Within, it appears to withdraw itself in four abysses,
now blending in one effulgence, now floating off from each
other as if they were distinct, and now opening out one
into another with such perspective that we cannot discern
where one begins and the other ends, for, like light in un-
stable water, the divisions bend and gleam for ever. Then,
though they seemed to be abysses, they are rather pleni-
tudes, plenitudes of living brightness.

The first is the plenitude of nature. All nature seems
to be there, and all the excellences of all natures. We
perceive nature to be there in such wise as that this Soul
is the Centre, the Cause, the Model, the Completion, and

SOUL AND BODY. 31 1

the Crown of all nature, whether angelical, human, or
material, as we have already seen elsewhere. Such a
beautiful perfection and glorious abundance of nature is in
that Soul, as to include in it the rightful sovereignty over
all natures, the root on which the grace of Headship is
grafted, belonging to it rather in right of its Humanity
than of its union with the Divinity ; for the sovereignty of
this last is of a different sort, resting on other grounds and
due upon other counts. It has even a natural capacity,
or rather a capacity in consequence of its nature, of receiving
such a communication of the Divine Nature as no other
creature, however sanctified, ever has received. God, it is
said, communicates Himself to creation in four ways, by
nature, by grace, by glory, and by the Hypostatic Union.
But we better perceive the unity of creation as itself a
transcript of the Divine Unity, if we say that God creates
for the purpose of communicating Himself to things outside
Himself, which are creatures, and that the way in which He
does so is one, namely, by the Hypostatic Union. For,
rightly considered, nature, grace, and glory are mere corol-
laries of the Hypostatic Union. They flow out from it,
being already virtually included in it. All natures outside
God exist because of this assumed nature of the word.
All grace is not only because of His grace, but from His
grace and through His grace. All glory, angelic or human,
is some sort of a transformation into the likeness of the
Incarnate Son of God.

The second plenitude of our Lord's Human Soul is the
fulness of its grace. We must but sketch in a few sentences,
what it would require a whole treatise to evolve. Four
depths are enclosed within this depth. He has, and none
other has but He, the unshared grace of union, that irresis
tible penetrative unction of the Divinity which steeps, as
in beatifying fire, the faculties of His Human Nature, and

312 SOUL AND BODY.

gives to its operations an illimitable worth. It is God's
greatest work, done for this Soul alone ; and it implies a
union of the Father and the Holy Ghost with the Soul of
a kind quite as unimaginable, as its union with the Person
of the Word, though of a totally different character, another
sort of indefinable intimacy with the Godhead. Then follows
an abyss of sanctifying grace, which none can fathom,
though we are told it comes within the possibility of being
fathomed, because it is just short of infinite. Theologians
not a few have absolutely pronounced it infinite.* If the
least fraction of sanctifying grace literally outvalues all
that nature has of dignity and worth, what must the grace
of the Soul of Jesus be, to which the combined graces of
men, angels, and Mary, multiplied in countless individuals,
outspread over patient ages, hardly afford an approximation ?
Nay, if the opinion of some theologians be true, that all
the graces of Christians were once numerically in our Blessed
Lord, that all grace in us is only the presence by replication,
as the schools speak, of some of the identical grace which
was actually and physically in our Lord's Soul, and therefore
that every grace is or has been actually and physically in
Him before, then our graces are something more than
approximations to His.t This doctrine presents us with a
picture of His Soul, the fascinations of which can only be
appreciated by long and loving meditation. It brings us
into startling relations with Bethlehem, with Nazareth, and
with Calvary. Yet there is another depth beyond, a serene
capacious land filled to overflowing with the seven gifts of
the Holy Ghost. Not even excepting the higher angels,
there are no spiritual creatures which we know of, of such

* Penafiel, Hurtado, Bernal, Vega, and many of the later scholastics.

t This opinion was taught by some of the doctors of Salamanca ; also
by Cardenas De Injinita Oratia Deiparce, by Meratius, De Incarnatione,
disp. 23, sect. 4, and by Nieremberg, Prezzo ddla Divina Oratia, lib. ill.
cap. 12.

30 UL AND BODY. 313

ravishing beauty as these peculiar created gifts of the Third
Person of the Holy Trinity. A slight lustre of them makes
a man shine on the altars of the Church as a saint, and the
nations see him afar off, and shout with joy as at a new
creation of our Heavenly Father, and he does not wax dim
through the thick ages, but is a steady light, giving light in
the darkness of time, yet only like an unrisen sun, compared
with the light, distinctive and distinguishable, which he
will give throughout eternity. These gifts sparkled in the
angels, and even apostles fell down to worship when they
saw, mistaking so great a splendour for divine. They
gleam in Mary with so full a ray that we are blinded to
her true greatness, and only see her as we see shapes in the
quivering shield of the sun. But they blaze their highest,
unconfined and unconsuming, in the Soul of Jesus, in a
breadth and depth and with a piercingness of which the
most heroic saints would be incapable.

Beyond this again there is another depth, where, sweetly
mastering all creations, meekly enthroning itself by the side
of God, the grace of headship dwells. Behold ! its unebbing
tide leaves not one rim of shore, yet, out of it, all the graces
of angels and of men have been drawn, and the deep feels it
not. Through seven kingly arches, with no stint of magni-
ficence in their vast design, but of giant stride, the grace is
rushing at all hours in sacramental streams, or better say
deluges, of love, over the outspread world. Countless other
rents let out that sea of light in a thousand directions. The
whole world outside of it streams like a cavern underground,
and drips and shines for ever. Yet the inward ocean sinks
not. All government, all right of judging, all dominion and
all usufruct of creatures, all spiritual eminence, all infallible
indefectible pontificates, all the prophetical sacerdotal, and
regal prerogatives, of Jesus come from this grace of headship.
It binds the two ends of time together, and carries them on

314 SOUL AND BODY.

with itself into an eternity, which, though it had a begin-
ning, can never know an end. Look at the top of heaven,
and see the sweet grandeur, tender for all it is so colossal,
man-loving if ever there were love of man, of the glorious
prince St. Michael ; and remember that he was saved by the
grace of this Human Soul equally with the relapsed sinner,
whom the Precious Blood has saved by the peculiarly human
method of redemption, and whom the single touch of a single
Sacrament has just borne through a safe judgment into a
secure eternity.

The third plenitude of our Lord's Soul was the fulness
of His science. It must be remembered that we are not
si)eaking of His omniscience as the Word, but, quite strictly,
of the science with which His Human Soul was supematur-
ally gifted, or which it had naturally acquired. It lies
before us in theology as two vast kingdoms, which we see,
as from a mountain, in confused loveliness ; but into whose
recesses the eye cannot penetrate, and whose horizon we
cannot explore. We cannot even descend from our point of
view to examine the landscape more nearly. If we go lower
down, it has disappeared altogether. It is like the view we
may have often seen from a high hill-top, a banner of green
and gold and blue unrolled under a flashing sun, with the
silver rivers striping it, and the purple ocean fluttering in
the distant haze as if it was a fringe. There is also a third
kingdom, which is shadowy and thin, as if it were but some
images of the other kingdoms painted by the light upon the
clouds, and moving there with indistinct outlines, as though
it were a pageant rather than a possession. It is thus we
may dare to picture to ourselves the science of our Lord's
Human Soul. There is first His beatific science, whereby,
in every moment and from the first moment of His life. He
beheld the Divine Essence more clearly than all the heavenly
hosts, and went nearer towards comprehending God than the

SOUL AND BODY. 315

highest angels have done in their long ages of intuitive
vision, or will have done in the remotest epochs of eternity
which we can intelligibly picture to ourselves. His Soul
did not comprehend God, simply because such a comprehen-
sion is not within the compass of any possible creature. He
saw more deeply into God, and He saw more in God, and
what He saw He saw more lucidly, than any other of the
Blessed ; and it is probable also that He saw it in a more
perfect way as well as in a more eminent degree. In every
one of His mysteries, whether of joy or sorrow or glory. He
possessed this science and beheld this Vision ; and, in
treating of the Passion, we shall have to consider those
strange operations, by which in certain depths of woe this
science was mysteriously turned off from the inferior part of
His Human Nature. Thus the whole width of heaven's
best beatitude was with Him always. If it is true that eye
cannot see, nor ear hear, nor heart conceive, the blessedness
of the baptized infant deceased in its fresh sacramental
innocence, how far must we be from anything like a just
appreciation of the beatific science of the Soul of Jesus 1
We may add figure to figure, it is true : but we are only
losing ourselves all the while in painted splendours, such
as sunset writes upon the countenances of the passing
clouds.

Of the next kingdom of His science we may know some-
thing more ; but it is only as geographers know of lands
they have not seen. Their brightest words are cold, and
they hardly leave a picture on the soul. His infused science
was His possession from the first. It was, as theologians
say, infused into Him in the first moment, because there was
no reason why it should be deferred, neither is there any
other time which for any cause could seem more congruous.
By this infused science He surpassed all theologies and
philosophies, all modern sciences and discoveries, and new

^i6 SOUL AND BODY.

sciences not yet dreamed of, and read all the secrets of angela
and men, and all the griefs and wants, the exultations and
contentments of animals. Some theologians, and one of no
mean fame, Hugh of St. Victor, have held that He knew
things hy an uncreated as well as a created knowledge.
From this opinion higher authorities and the reason of the
thing persuade us to dissent. It even seems more probable
that He did not know by the infused science of His Human
Soul all possible things, though of course He knew them as
the Word. This is the nearest approach to a limit which
we dare to set to the infused science of His Soul. We hold
that it was infused into Him in the highest manner of
infusion. We hold with St. Thomas, that by this infused
science, all presents, pasts, and futures lay clearly and uncon-
fusedly and in infallible light before Him, without effort or
investigation, whether they be of natural or supernatural
objects. By this science He knew without images, and
therefore needed not the use of His senses to it, and so it
was not suspended in His sleep. He knew all that He knew
simultaneously, without succession or development, because,
as Vasquez acutely remarks, if it were not so, then ignorance
might in some sense be imputed to Him at least at certain
given moments. The species, to use the old scholastic word,
by which He knew, were more universal, or, to speak modern
language, His ideas were more real, and absolute,* than those
of the angels, and accompanied by a more self-evidencing
light ; for His science was infused into Him in proportion to
His grace rather than His nature, which is an important prin-
ciple to bear in mind throughout the whole of this subject.
He saw things, moreover, as they are in themselves, and con-
sequently in a loftier, nearer, more real, and more divine

• See the most interesting chapter of Amicus on the perfection of our
Lord's infused science as compared with that of the angels. — Be Incarna^
tione, disp. xx. sect. xiv.

SOUL AND BODY. 317

manner. How beautiful therefore must all the physical
sciences have been to His Soul, thus seeing things down in
their real beings, unbewildered by the fallacies of phenomena,
and unfatigued by the processes of induction. All knowledge
was necessarily theology to Him from this truthful method
of His science. Thus there passed no shadow of ignorance
over His Soul, not the faintest or the most gauze-like veil of
it, so far as it is an intellectual imperfection ; and that, be it
remembered, not because He saw all things as the Word,
but by the perfection of the infused science of His Human
Soul.

The third kingdom of His science comprises the knowledge
He condescended to acquire ; and of this we have spoken
before. He knew nothing by acquisition which He had not
already known by infusion. He stooped to learn in a lower
way, what He knew before in a higher way without learning
at all. His acquired science is rather a revelation of His
character than an addition to His glorj\ He would be more
like us. He would know things in our way, and come to
know them as we do. As He let the rain beat upon His
Face, and the wind play with His Hair, and the lightning
blind His Eyes, and the thunder vibrate in His Ears, so He
let experience beat upon Him ; and what came of it was
what we call His acquired science. He will allow Himself
to receive the impressions of experience, not deceitfully, but
silently, as fathers let their children tell them what they
knew before, and out of love will not backen their forward-
ness by declaring their intelligence to be needless. They
give pleasure by seeming to learn. It was in some such
way that our Lord condescended to acquire knowledge by
undergoing experience. It is not so much a matter of His
Mind. It is rather one of those attitudes which reveal His
Heart. He clings to all the imperfections of our nature to
which He can decorously submit Himself, even although

3i8 SOUL AND BODY,

they be not necessary to the grand work He has come to da
Or rather it intimates to us how much more true a view oi
the Incarnation we should take, if we could more habitually
think of the Incarnation as itself His work, rather than of
the work He did when He became incarnate, regarding this
last but as a manifestation of the first. But in this matter
of His acquired science we must never forget that theologians
are agreed that He learned nothing directly either from
angels or men. They regard such an idea to be inadmissible,
because it is unbecoming to His dignity as Head, Master,
Teacher, and Illuminator, both of angels and of men ; and
He filled these offices, not simply as the Word, but in the
Human Nature which He had assumed.

The consideration of these plenitudes of His grace and of
His science leaves us little to say of the fourth plenitude of
His Soul, the fulness of glory. Indeed it is in its own self
uuspeakabla We may contemplate the glory of His Soul
either as it is in heaven now, or as it was in the years of
His Childhood. Like His grace, because answering to Hia
grace, it lies before us in four regions of astonishing splendour,
lost in light yet cognisably dififering from each other. There
is first of all His beatific glory, which answers to His sanctify-
ing grace. It is the world of His sanctifying grace in the
full bloom of its magnificence, and thus immensely surpassing
in its radiance that grace which we have already seen to be
marvellous. On no side is there any limit to be discovered
to this country of beatitude. Its confines are lost beyond
all the imaginable limits of which we have the power to
dream. Its vast plains stretch onward and onward, until
the soul is wounded with gazing upon such outspread
immensities of light. All we know is that it has limits
somewhere. In our manner of speaking it is close upon
infinite, and yet it is truly finite, finite to the eye of God,
practically infinite to the thought of creatures. We need

SOUL AND BODY, 319

not linger to enquire of what multitudinous bright things
this light is made, nor how piercingly bright each element of
it is even in itself. Thoughts become dreams and dazzle us,
when we try to fix them on such a subject.

Beyond those distant confines, which our fancy has not
reached, and yet also as if by some play of light represented
inside the kingdom of His beatific glory, is His exemplary
glory, which answers to the heroic grace of the gifts of the
Holy Ghost. It is this glory by which He is the pattern
and model of all the glory of all glorified creatures. There
is not an angel, but hia glory, difi'ering characteristically
from the glory of all other angels, is as it were a drop of
resplendent spray flung from the mighty cataract of the
glory of the Soul of Jesus. Each saint is an orb of himself,
a star, as St. Paul calls him. He is known by the light he
gives, and can be named from the coronal he wears, and
there is no other coronal in heaven like his. Yet he is but
a beauty borrowed from the glory of Jesus. Each saint,
each of the redeemed, each boy in heaven who had had the
use of his reason for a month or two, has a sanctity with a
character of its own, and that character is substantially
expressed in the features of his glory.

Perhaps each baptized infant may have one sort of natural
character rather than another upon which his future grace
would have been grafted : and the glory won for him by
the waters of the font may be allowed to fulfil that
undeveloped sanctity, and give him a beauty of his own in
heaven. This seems the more likely when we consider
that reasons are never alike, and that he will at least have
the full use of reason, and of his own reason, in heaven.
The gestures, the tempers, the play of unreasoning children
form a prophetic mirror on which their future good and evil
are frequently depicted with minute fidelity. It is but a
step further for glory to anticipate sufficient of the developed

320 SOUL AND BODY.

character to give a fashion to the radiance of the soui.
The pattern of our Lady's glory is taken from the glory of
the Soul of Jesus. She perhaps may represent all His
glory upon a lesser scale. At all events He is the glorified
Soul, on the model of whom the glory of all spirits and
souls has been moulded, and there is none comes so near
to that magnificent exemplar as the soul of His own Mother
Mary. In the countless darting splendours and innumerable
refulgences of heaven, to which the little silver flashings
of all the sunlit oceans are as nothing in their multitude,
there is not one gleam, one play of light, which in its cause
and pattern is not already visible from the throne of the
Sacred Humanity.

A third region of glory opens on our sight. His sovereign
glory, which answers to the grace of headship. This is
the glory of His human royalty. It is in tliis glory that
He rules the whole creation of God. The manifold attri-
butes of His kingship over the angels belong to this. The
sceptre with which He sways the empire of the redeemed
is a ray of this brightness. The beautiful operations of
His judicial power, exercised many times in a moment the
whole world over, are illuminated and made worshipful by
the shining of this glory. There is a moonlight even over
purgatory caught from the luminous mountains of this land.
We know Jesus chiefly as our Saviour now, and He is
endless in His loveliness, continually disclosing Himself to
us in new relations, and detaining our delighted love in
new captivities. In heaven, without losing Him as our
Saviour, we shall see more of Him as our King, and many
an unsuspected grandeur and many an unimagined attraction
will reveal themselves to us in His royalty. All this will
be from the region of His sovereign glory. They who have
an enthusiastic devotion to the Church are at once meriting
9- share of this glory, and anticij)ating it.

I

I

SOUL AND BODY. 321

But, once more, a fresh region of glory opens upon our
sight. It is His glory of filiation, which answers to the
grace of union. It is here His glory seems to lose itself in
the abysses of divine light, and to merge in the lightnings
of the Godhead. His Sonship is no mere adoption, like
that of the highest saints and of all glorified creatures. We
shun the very word adoption, when we speak of Him, lest
we should seem to derogate from the immensity of His
exaltation. Eternally the natural Son of God as the ever-
begotten Word, He is also the natural, and not the merely
adopted, Son of God as Man, because of the union of His
Humanity with the Person of the Word. This is the top-
most pinnacle of His glory. We have nothing to do here,
but to be silent and adore.

If from the courts of heaven we turn to the Infant Soul
in Bethlehem, the same glory is already there, not only in
its causes and its roots, but in its substance and possession.
It has not to be achieved. It is already won. It lies in
His grace, and His grace was ungrowing from the first. The
vastness of His merits and the marvellous series of the
Three-and-Thirty Years may deck it with some external
ornaments, which would not else have shone there. But
upon its substance they made little or no impression. It
belonged to His Soul, it was in His Soul, when He lay upon
His Mother's lap. What are the triumphs of His Church,
what is the outward exaltation of His Name, what even the
multitude of glorified companions whom He won for Him-
self by His merits, compared with those interminable realms
of glory which belonged to Him in His own right from
the first ?

We have multiplied words, not without the guidance of
theology, in order that we might obtain some remotely
worthy conception of our Lord's Human SouL Let us look
at it for a moment from one other point of view. Every

z

322 SOUL AND BODY.

creature has a worth of its own, with which its Creator ha«
mercifully enriched it. Yet it is more to us to know what
his Creator thinks of him, than to know what he is worth
himself ; and it is not so much his own worth, as God's love,
which is the measure of the divine appreciation of him.
Nevertheless God's esteem of creatures becomes the creature's
real worth, because it raises him to His own height. Let us
think then of the divine complacency in the Soul of Jesus,
in order that we may thus understand its singular eminence
in all creation. The Holy Trinity loved it more than all
creatures put together. We could not doubt this for a
moment without impiety. The Father has Himself declared
it from heaven. He rejoices in it as giving Him room for
the liberality of His gifts, and space in which to mirror His
own perfections.

Everywhere else in creation, even in the vastness of
sidereal space, His glory is cramped. The littleness of
creation will not hold the grandeur He longs to pour into
it. But the Soul of Jesus is a spiritual super-angelic
heaven in which the sanctity of God can expatiate, and
reproduce itself in a created form, not altogether unwortliy
of His magnificence. There is enough in that Soul to form
the joy of all creatures for ever ; yet all that joy is from the
love which God bears to it. The Holy Trinity broods over
it in adorable delight. Yet each of the Divine Persons
also has His own complacency therein. Its natural. Sonship
makes it unspeakably dear to the Father. His Paternity
is His own blessedness. So content is He with being the
Father of the Son, that He never began begetting Him and
never will desist, so dear to Him is that unutterable
mystery. But here is a second filiation of the same Son
accomplished in that miracle of the Incarnation, which
contains and involves all His external glory, because it
contains and involves all creation ; and behold ! as in return,

SOUL AND BODY. 323

the especial characteristic of the created sanctity of that
dear Soul is intense devotion to the Father's glory. The
Holy Spirit loves that Soul with a love peculiar to Himself.
It is in some special manner His own appropriate creation.
He lingers over it with a dove-like complacency. He is
for ever drawn to it because of the abundance of His own
gifts which it contains. To the Word who shall say how
inexpressibly dear that Soul must be, to which He has
united Himself with such an unparalleled union? We
sink out of our depth the moment we enter upon the
thought of the love between the Person of the Son and
the glad Nature which He assumed. Hence it is that oui
devotion to the Divine Person of our Lord is always the
measure of our devotion to His Human Soul ; and Mary
is the pattern to us of both these two devotions, which the
fire of love soon melts and mingles into one.

Such in the gorgeous creation of God is the Human Soul
of Jesus. From His Soul let us turn to His Body. Let
us consider it first of all in its relation to His SouL The
body of man is a mystery which on this side of the grave we
can never hope to comprehend. Admirable as are the things
which philosophy or science can teach us of it now, they are
as nothing to what the resurrection of the flesh will teach
us hereafter. This is one of the reasons why the Resur-
rection of our Lord is a mystery so dear to our devotions.
We dare to regard it as a portrait of ourselves. We feel our
bodies here on earth more than we feel our souls, and we
come to love them more; and almost unconsciously, even
in spite of Christian mortification, we put them uppermost
in our thoughts. We listen with awe to the accounts of
the inward trials of the saints, not without sympathy but
with less sympathy than awe ; but our heart leaps up, as
all hearts do, to the heroes who suffer corporal martyrdom.
Jesus Risen is what we are to be, what we are travelling

324 SOUL AND BODY.

towards, our pattern, the earnest of our own transform ation
into its likeness, nay, in itself containing the very living
power by whose energy we shall be transformed. Our
whole frame is sown with wonderful possibilities. Roots
of glory are embedded in it everywhere. Every pore of it
may be a new sense under other circumstances. It can
put on immortality. It can clothe itself in more than solar
light. It can compass worlds in its mature agility. It
can rival spirit in its amazing subtlety. If all this is true
of all the bodies of the just, what must be said of the Body
of Jesus, the cause, the model, the sovereign, the very
food of our bodies 1

Its relation to his Soul is not therefore to be lightly
thought of. His Body was itself a beautiful creation, a
world of wonders, a master-piece of God. It has been the
greatest and most energetic power in the history of the world ;
it was the instrument of creating the world over again, and
its sufferings have shaped the destinies of every man that
has been born into the world. It was necessary to our Lord's
Soul in order to complete His Human Nature. The Hypo-
static Union could not have been accomplished without it.
While the momentary separation of His Body and His Soul
was an awful mystery, involving the very accomplishment
of our redemption, their permanent separation would be an
imperfection and a dishonour. Neither was our Lord's Body
a clog to His Soul, as ours is, enfeebling its grasp, shortening
its reach, obstructing its sight, and hindering its aspirations.
It was to Him an additional power of sanctity, an additional
breadth of life. The Soul loved it for many reasons, but
perhaps for none so much as its being the special instrument
of suffering, and so enabling the Soul to quench, if not
wholly yet with fearful copiousness, the thirst for suffering
with which it was inflamed, and which it declared at the
last moment to be still unsatisfied upon the Cross.

I

SOUL AND BODY. 325

Moreover His Body was that portion of His Nature for
nrhich He put Himself directly in debt to Mary ; and, while
this was another source of the love wliicli He bore it, the
immense exaltation of His Mother is also a measure, not
only of His love of His Body, but of its place and dignity
in the creation of God. His Body also heightens the
mystery of His assumption of a created nature, because it
brings Him lower down into creation, even among material
things. This makes His condescension the more wonderful,
and His embrace of the universe the more complete. There
would be a sadness and a forlornness in the exile of matter
from the Hypostatic Union, which it is now difficult for us
to calculate, so entirely has the opposite and most consolatory
fact grown into our minds and become part of ourselves.
Infinitely loving as it would have seemed, how much less
touching, benignant, pathetic, would the mystery have been,
had the Word taken to Himself an angelical rather than
a human nature 1 How diflferent would all our theology
have been, and how unspeakably different our idea of God !
Banished to the confines of His creation in what a region of
cold and darkness should we have wandered, where the fires
of His central throne would scarce have warmed us, whether
left to the punishment of our sins, or contented with some
poor natural beatitude, or, if saved by His grace, on such
other terms of intimate love and glad familiarity from tliose
on which we are now, when the dear angels seem strangers
in heaven rather than ourselves.

By the Body, also, the Soul of Jesus has in some sense
learned new things, and now enjoys peculiar pleasures
through it, and gains especially the multiplied presence of
the Blessed Sacrament. Moreover it has an independence
of the Soul, which is a part of its relation to it. For it has
its own immediate union with the Word. It has not been
assumed through the Soul, but separately and in itself. So

326 SOUL AND BODY.

that when the Soul left the Body on the Cross, the Body
was still united to the Person of the Word, and, dead as it
was, claimed absolute worship and aU other divine honours.
It is entitled to a separate worship of its own, and its divine
union was in no wise impaired by the absence of the SouL

Surely then it must be with intense reverence that we draw
near the Infant Body of our Lord to gaze upon it, not with
a careless curiosity, but with adoring love, and a wonder which
for His honour longs to become more and more intelligent
He tells us His whole Heart at first sight ; for He lies before
us in all the littleness of an Infant. He is not full grown as
Adam was. Though He was to be the second Adam, while
He was in reality the first Adam, before Adam, the type of
Adam, and not Adam His type, nevertheless He will be
unlike Adam rather than forego any shade of humiliation
which He can obtain by being but as one of Adam's children.
He will have a Mother, like the rest of us. He will owe
His Flesh and Blood to another, as we do. He will sur-
render the privilege of being fashioned immediately by God's
own hand, as Adam was. He will be little, and helpless,
and hampered by all the incommodities of infancy, because,
although He is in that way less like Adam, He is more like
us, and participates deeper down in our dishonours. Thus it
is that everything He does tells us all about Him. Every
shifting attitude in each of His mysteries is a breathing-place
to relieve the immense love of His Sacred Heart. In this
sweet choice of infant stature He reveals His character, and
supplies us with a new motive of happy confidence.

We must consider also the exquisite delicacy of His Body.
It was formed by the Holy Spirit, and bears upon its work-
manship the marks of that Divine Person's peculiar com-
placency. It was formed out of Mary's purest blood, in
which the pulses of sin had never beaten, upon which the
kingdom of darkness had never had so much as the shadow

SOUL AND BODY. 327

of a claim, but which had stood from the first in the broad
light of God's choicest grace. His Precious Blood was a
beautiful emanation from a fountain already incomparably
beautiful in itself, because of its exceeding purity. All the
works of God are faultless in their fitness, whatever other
imperfections it may be His good pleasure to leave, as if
inevitably attaching to their created nature. Now the Body
of Jesus was created a fit dwelling for His Soul ; and we
have seen already how great the dignity of that Soul was in
the esteem of God. It was formed also to suffer exquisitely,
in order to accomplish the great work of our redemption.
Hence its sensibilities were quickened and refined, and all
its capabilities of feeHng rendered delicate, and active, and
rapid, and acute, with the power of communicating thrills of
an intensity which we could hardly comprehend.

It was in these respects like no other human body that
ever was. If we could have seen it as it really was in itself,
we should have been both amazed and terrified to see a
vessel of such heavenly fragility moving about among the
coarse forms and in the jarring complexities of common
earthly life. Neither must we forget that it was formed
also to bear, without breaking, impetuous torrents of glory.
That little infant frame, white as a snowdrop on the lap of
winter, light almost as a snowflake on the cliill night-air,
smooth as the cushioned drift of snow which the wind has
lightly strewn outside the walls of Bethlehem, is at this
moment holding within itself, as if it were of adamantine
rock, the fires of the beatific light, the stupendous ocean of
the mighty Vision, the gigantic play of eternal things that
come and go and live within its SouL A Person, omni-
potent and infinite, sits within those white walls of fleshly
marble, and they do not even vibrate with the marvellous
indwelling.

The beauty of His Body is beyond what art has ever

328 SOUL AND BODY.

dreamed ; and it is a beauty only to be discovered by eyes
which have been touched with the special euphrasy of
heaven, in order that they may know God's beautiful things
when they behold them. Its beauty is a joy in heaven at
this hour ; and what must beauty be which can gladden the
Blessed there? The immaterial angels gaze upon it with
astonishment and delight. The saints yearn after it until
in some spiritual way they become shadowy likenesses of it
themselves. Theology does injustice to art, and yet must
be allowed to go unblamed for what it does. It cannot help
itself. It is a necessity of the eyesight of its science. It
turns from the loveliest divine Babes of Raphael, deeply
wounded, almost angry, only dissipating its anger by clearing
its heart with tears. So dishonourable, even unlovely we
must say, are all pictures of the Holy Child compared with
that colourless unoutlined vision of Him which theology
sees always in her mind. But what have the lines and
colours of earth to do with the beauty which is a magnet
up in heaven ?

Its likeness to Mary is something more than part of its
exceeding beauty ; and it is a characteristic of it which we
must never fail to notice. Part of the mystery of her great-
ness is in that adorable similitude. At the first, God com-
municated His image to man ; now woman communicates
her image to God. Who does not tremble at the mention
of such incomprehensible condescension 1 Whose heart does
not burn with joy at the thought of what His Mother was
allowed to do ? Of how much spiritual nearness and of how
many deeper similitudes is not this likeness the symbol and
the suflBcient evidence ? Oh wonderful to think of ! the little
white lily is blooming below the greater one, an offshoot of
its stem, and a faithful copy, leaf for leaf, petal for petal,
white for white, powdered with the same golden dust, meet-
ing the morning with the same fragrance, which is like no

SOUL AND BODY. 329

other than their own 1 God copying His own creature, —
creation has seldom had a sight so fair to see !

But the urn full of Blood, the urn of Flesh within that
Body, is the most wonderful of all. Doubtless there were
other hearts of new-born babes in Bethlehem that night,
which, measure for measure, might be of the same dimen-
sions as His own, and with the same curves of the common
human heart as His; and the blood in them was dear to
Him, and allied to His, because it was soon to be poured
out for Him in cruel martyrdom. But there was no heart
like to His, and there was no good in any heart which was
not there because of the good that was in His. But that
infant Heart which sent forth the tears He shed, which gave
the tone and impulse to the sighs He uttered, which played
upon His lips in smiles so full of meanings for Mary to
interpret, which rose and fell during His wakeful sleep, —
it was one of the greatest wonders in God's creation. Its
adoration was worthy of God. It was a more gigantic choir
of the divine praises than all the stupendous worlds of which
God is master. The impetuosity of its littleness wrapped
the majesty of God round about in the strong embraces of
its worship. It sang more songs than all the angels, and
sweeter songs, and they were more divinely sung. It kept
more lamps burning before the Throne than there will be
spirits and souls in heaven, when it shall be fullest.

Nay, they were fires rather than lamps, unquenchable
watchfires round the Uncreated Fire, and not unseemly in
their exceeding nearness to it It could offer oblations in
some sense equal to God Himself, and matching His
immensity. Its love was a very living shadow of the Holy
Ghost. Itself unconsuming, it consumed all things else
in honour of the Most High. It had more love of God in
it than all the love that God gets elsewhere, outside
Himself. It had more love of man in it than there \b

330 SOUL AND BODY.

elsewhere in the world, outside of God. It confused
nothing, and forgot nobody. We were in it We had our
own place in it at that very hour. It rested in us ; yet it
rested nowhere out of God. It reposed upon our little
returns of love with a repose more real than our love, and
yet which was unreal compared with the tranquillity with
which it reposed in God. Its love of Mary was its nearest
approach to rest in creatures. Its utter rest was only in
the deep will of God.

The blood that went and came, that ebbed and flowed, in
•that heart-shaped urn of flesh, what volumes might not be
written of its grandeurs 1 By it alone is accomplished the
whole spiritual chemistry of tlie regenerate earth. It washes
away the foul taints of an unclean world, and defiles not its
own rosy brightness in the washing. It dilutes and neutra-
lises all the poison of creation, and absorbs no poisonous
qualities itself. It transfigures what it touches. It glorifies
where it falls. It deifies that which it rests upon. Its
miracles are the most prodigious of all miracles. Their
instantaneous conversions are almost incredible. It hides
itself in Sacraments in a manner which the highest science is
unable to detect. It acts upon the substance of the soul
with the keenest and most spiritual transmutations. The
more it sheds, the more it has to shed. It distils freely out
of the glorious veins of heaven into thousands of chalices
every day. Yet the veins bleed not, and no one sees it falL
The Sacred Heart sends it at each pulsation to the uttermost
ends of creation; and it returns momentarily as pure as
when it left the Heart, but laden with booty for God's glory
80 plentiful that it seems to encumber heaven. It must
communicate itself. This is the blessed necessity of its life,
as it is also so adorably the case with the full life of God.
We are always wet with this Blood. It is perpetually falling
upon us. We leave the marks of it on everything we touch

SOUL AND BODY. 331

There is the stain of Blood upon our whole Christian life.
It is this which makes life so awful, because it is such an
endless deifying of what is human. "We are so marked
with it that our guilt in the Crucifixion is brought home to
us beyond a doubt ; and yet it is just these stains which are
our acquittal. We weep because it has been shed, and we
do well in weeping. Yet, if it had not been shed, we
should all have wept eternally.

His Flesh is hardly a mother's arm-full. Yet by an
astounding miracle it is the food of all other flesh in the
grand Sacrament of the altar. It is our Lord's Body with
which we have most to do on earth. It is His Body which
is prominently worshipped, rather than His soul, in the
Blessed Sacrament It is His Body pre-eminently which is
trusted to our keeping, and which resides abidingly amongst
us in tabernacles made with hands. It is His Body which
we ourselves spiritually are ; for His Church is truly His
Body, and it is this which makes the condition of schism
80 blighted and forlorn. He touches us by His Body, feeds
us by His Body, makes us one by His Body, yea makes us
His Body. It is the Hand both of His Soul and of His
Divinity, the Hand to baptise, the Hand to confirm, to
absolve, to communicate, to anoint, to marry, to ordain, tlie
Hand that touches and does the miracles, that takes hold
and lifts up, that points the way and leads on, that strikes
those who deal over-lightly with it, and that heals so often
with the compassionate roughness of its blow. That Infant
Body is shrouding its glory, as we gaze upon it : but that is
no trial to our faith. We see the glory there, for all it
makes itself invisible. But there is one thing wanting in
the Infant Body, one thing which may make us slow to
recognise it for the same as the body in heaven. It wants
earth's seals. It lacks the Five Wounds, to which it clings
80 fondly as to retain them on its throne, not for oui

332 SOUL AND BODY.

reproach, but for our everlasting jubilee. The Infant Bodjf
needs thus to be more earthly in order to be more manifestly
heavenly.

We have done. The union of this Body and Soul is the
Sacred Humanity of our Lord, a Nature with no personality
of its own lying under it, and supplying it with a human
self-consciousness. It lies upon the Person of the Word,
not inertly as the whole helpless creation lies in the sustain-
ing hand of its Almighty Maker, but united to the Divine
Person, and instinct with richest life. Exuberant in its
own nature, it is exuberant most of all in its Divine Union.
Such is the Sacred Humanity. Its perfection is in the
union of the Body and the Soul. We have seen that it is
acknowledged and worshipped as their Head by the angels
who are of a different and superior nature. The likeness to
it in glory is the end to which all that is high and holy
among men is tending. It is capacious enough to satisfy an
eternal desire of the Eternal Word. It is the greatest world
of all the worlds, the Central World of the Divine Decrees.
By the separation of the Body and the Soul, and exclusively
and precisely by that, the Passion was consummated and
the atonement made ; and by the reunion of them in the
Resurrection, and exclusively and precisely by that, our
justification was completed. He died for our sins, says the
Apostle, and rose again for our justification. As the magni-
ficence of God is in His Unity, so the grandeur of creation
is in its unities, which shadow forth the Unbeginning Unity.
Second among these unities is the union of our Lord's Soul
and Body. There is no other such union in creation, except
that greater union, belonging to them only, and belonging
to each of them, by which they are both united to the
Divine Person of the Word; and of this union the Holy
Ghost was the principle. It was His fecundity outside of
God, who had no fecundity within God ; and thus did the

SOUL AND BODY. 333

fruitful Spirit carry on outside of God that free divine life
whose necessary course was closed in His own infinite and
eternal Procession.

From this dread thought comes one thought more. Inside
the Most Holy Trinity it is equally divine, equally adorable,
to produce, to be produced, or not to produce. Much more
therefore to create or not to create were in God equally
adorable. Thus we gaze with astonishment upon this world
of the Sacred Humanity, the magnificence of the Hypostatic
Union, the resplendency of our Lord's Human Soul, the
energy and beauty of His Body, the sublimity of their union,
and the natural impersonality of them both. We see with
amazement how all these things are mixed up with God,
and how God would be unknown and inconceivable without
them, and how the whole of His external glory is implicated
in them. Yet were they, and with them all creation which
hangs like pendants from them, to wither away, and dis-
solve, and be effaced in its own original nothingness, and
divinest oblivion to cover it all, the whole system might
drop from God, as the ragged silver mists drop from the
sunrise, and melt into nothing, and go nowhither, and Ilis
grandeur would arise the same, and shine into itself, pouring
into its own bosom all its splendour, and upon its bri^^^itness
there would be no vestige of the vanished worlds, the lost
creation. The ruin of things would be but a fresh flash of
His magnificence. The loss could in no wise attaint His
grandeur. The Threefold Solitude of the old eternity would
come back again, and He would have been immutable all
the while. 0 what must Thy grandeur be, 0 God ! in
whose light the greatness of the Sacred Humanity thus pales
to nothingness !

But let us turn back, like frightened children, to that
mystery of love. It is no show, no festal pageant, not a
brightnesis followed by a darkness, not a glory that can pasg

334 SOUL AND BODY.

away. The Eternal has become a little Babe. That will
now be true eternally. The Incomprehensible lies infantine,
and smiling joyously, on the lap of an earthly Mother, who
loves us more dearly than our own unselfish mothers ever
loved us. She gazes on Him : so do we. It is Flesh. That
light is out of an Infant's eyes. We, with her, privileged
by faith as she by sight, watch the pulses rise and fall. We
listen to the beatings of His Heart. It is all flesh and blood,
beautiful exceedingly, mysterious exceedingly. We lean over ;
we stoop down ; we feel His warm breath against our faces ;
we kiss His living lips. Mary would have it so ; it was she
who taught us to be venturesome and free; — and who, if
not she, would know His will ?

Verily it is all flesh and blood. Are we not disquieted to
do great things for Him ? It is the wonderful, the terrible,
the all-knowing, the unbeginning God, who lies so little and
so calm on Mary's knee. It is the infinite Creator, blessed
a thousand times for His uncreated majesty, and now equally
a thousand times for His created littleness and lowliness and
loveliness. It must be the masculine efi'ort, the persevering
strain of a life-long dependence upon grace, which alone can
rightly honour the all-holy Babe, the almighty Little One,
the eternal Child, as well for the mystery of His gentleness,
as for the exulting faith, whereby, with our hearts upon our
lips, we can say with the Church those few tremendous
words, which make the angels and archangels to bow down,
and the strong bright thrones of heaven to totter and to
tremble in an adoration which blends fear and joy in one, —
Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine, et
Homo factus est 1

i 335 ; '

CHAPTER TIL

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

Sorrow is the substance of man's natural life, and it might
almost be defined to be his natural capability of the super-
natural. Joy is but a thin shade, except when it is in alter-
nation with sorrow. The power of art is in the sorrowful.
No poetry finds its way into a nation's mind, or can dwell
there, unless it have a burden of sorrow in it. To glorify
sonow is one of the highest functions of song, of sculpture,
or of painting. Nothing has a lasting interest for men which
is not in some way connected with sorrow. All that is
touching, pathetic, dramatic, in man's life has to do with
sorrow. Sorrow is the poetry of a creation which is fallen,
of a race which is in exile, in a vale of tears closed in at the
end by the sunless defile of death. Religion has rathei
added to all this than taken from it.

Our sorrow is now more purely sorrow since gloom and
despair have been chased away from it. "We have been
redeemed by sorrow. The mysteries of our Lord are chiefly
mysteries of sorrow. Our Lady is the Mother of woes. The
offices and ceremonies of the Church incline rather to be
pensive than to be triumphant. Joy on earth is confessedly
for a time. It rises out of sorrow, and it falls back upon it
again. All devotion has an element of softness in it, which,
if it is not sorrow, is at least akin to it and congenial to it.
Sympathy is the bond of hearts, and all sympathy has some

336 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

of the blood of sorrow in its veins. While joy often jars
upon our spirits, sorrow hardly ever seems misplaced, even
when it is unwelcome.

The old mystics spoke of two kinds of men, the solar and
the lunar. Some were in occult sympathy with the sun,
and were ruled by its mysterious influences. Their tempera-
ment and their intellect bore some analogy to the character
of the sun. Their power of working, their way of work,
and the kind of work they chose, were all under the influence
of his sovereign beam. Their very diseases were supposed
to arise from some malignity of the solar ray, which settled
by preference on certain members of the body rather than
others. Then there were others who went through life
almost as if there were no sun, or at least who quietly used
its material light, as a lamp which Providence had placed at
their disposal. But they were under equal subjection to the
moon and her wayward beam of cold nocturnal silver played
upon their sensitive frames and their responsive souls, as the
winds play upon an aeolian harp. So there are men in the
world who are better for joy, who are humbled by its sweet-
ness, and expand imder its shining ; and on the other hand
there are men who are better for sorrow, and to whom it is
the altogether necessary atmosphere of goodness. These last
outnumber the first by many millions. The souls, whom
joy nurtures in holiness, are so completely the exceptional
cases, that for the multitude of hearers or of readers we may
speak as if all men were at home with sorrow, and lived
with it as with their guardian angel.

There are some men to whom sorrow teaches all things
and to whom also sorrow is the sole revelation. They can
only learn by sorrow. They do not understand any other
language. They are not capable of taking in any other
experience. What is clear as light they cannot see, until
the shadow of sorrow has fallen upon it. We come ^croas

I

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 337

these men daily on our way through life. There are others
who go further than this. They are men who can only
work in the shade of some supposed impending catastrophe.
They feel always that they are walking into a darkness and
down a gulf, and the belief cheers them, and the darkness
recedes and the gulf travels backwards, but their idea of them
both is the mainspring of their activity and power. Others,
who can do without sorrow in other things, cannot do with-
out it in their religion. It becomes to them their fear, their
reverence, and their love. It is the fountain of their devo-
tion, and the stimulus of their duty. They find sorrow in
all the mysteries of Jesus, no matter how joyful or glorious
they may be. Sorrow is the condition of all their heavenly-
mindedness. Sorrow converted them ; sorrow perfects them ;
sorrow is their final perseverance.

It is in these sorrow-sainted men that life some-
times appears to faint as if it must needs end before the
harbour of death is visible; and then they are strangely,
and to our eyes supernaturally, as if they were heaven's
favourites, refreshed by gales from the other world, like
the landwinds that came fraught with the fragrance of
the sassafras to Columbus and his faltering crew. There
are other men whose characters are only brought out by
sorrow, timid, feminine natures, whose true grandeur is as
little suspected by themselves as it is by those around them.
From outward circumstances or from inward shrinking,
sometimes it may even be from indolence, they have left
their own nature unexplored. They are like the unadven-
turous dwellers among the hills, who have no true idea of
the vastness of that mountain-range upon whose outskirts
they have pitched their tents, and who never suspect how
the valleys fall back upon each other, and wind inward like
the convolutions of a mighty shell. It needs a storm to tell
them this, and then the thunder makes trumpets of the

y

338 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

glens and reveals to them by its rolling echoes the inacces-
sible recesses of the inner mountains. So it is with these
men. The cry of sorrow goes forth in their soul, and its
echoes come trembling up from depths of which they never
dreamed. Others there are whom sorrow shames into good-
ness. Too much happiness often makes men prematurely
old by anticipating the passive tranquillity of weariness
and years, while sorrow, especially if it comes in the shape
of disappointment, thrusts middle life back into youth, by
keeping alive an activity always fretful and mostly persever-
ing. They are in general the youngest^looking men in
mind and heart who come latest in life to that which they
have lived for. It is sorrow which tows them into harbour
at the last.

But, on the other hand, with characters where premature
old age is needed, to conquer, to soften, and to sanctify, it
is sorrow which does the characteristic work of age by
humbling their highmindedness. Then all their nature is
transfigured. Sorrow beautifies their harshness, as blue
distance or golden light glorify the cliflFs. They are children
now, who from childhood have been rebels. They worship
now, in whose nature worship had seemed an element that
was wanting. Sorrow has done the work of grace, and
grace has done time's work better and more speedily than
time could do it. In what an evening light the age which
sorrow works, and not time, can clothe a once ungenial
nature ! How often in the slanting shades of evening, the
mountains seem to come down into the valley, and kneel
to pray, while the starry lamps of the eternal sanctuary are
being lighted above their heads. This is what happens to
the soul when sorrow ages it ; it ages it so graciously.

There are unquiet characters also, which sorrow seems
to lull, just as the placid country appeases the city-wearied
epirit with a soothing which is half pain and half pleasure,

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 339

like the balm that mothers pour over the chafed limbs
of their little ones. They have sought peace for years
and have never found it. Now sorrow has come, and
lo ! peace was hidden in its folds. So also to unsuccessful
men sorrow comes like a success. They sit down contented
now. They look with indifference on their broken idols.
They no longer care to succeed in those things in which
they have been unsuccessful Sorrow has come, and they
have found in it just what they looked for in success.
Some men are deluded through half their lives, and for
the most part deluded precisely where they least doubted
that they were right ; and sorrow is their disenchanting.
It is their merciful fairy, who breaks the spell, and restores
them to their proper shapes. Then there are souls who
cannot keep a direct road. Indeed it is so natural to men
to wander, that their feet cannot cross a field but in a
tortuous path. For such men sorrow makes life an alley,
with a clipped and prickly hedge on either side, which,
if it be ungraceful, at least is safe ; and to those who will
not seek perfection safety is salvation. Some men have
lives apart, destinies so singular that they resemble no
other human fortunes, but, like the strange scenery of
Tierra del Fuego, mate with nothing else on earth. These
men are hard to sanctify. Sorrow must come first, and
envelope them in all its soft humanities, and make them
commonplace, and, after that, grace will sow its seeds.

Then there are volcanic characters. Yolcanic soil is
wonderfully productive ; so it is with volcanic characters.
They take long to ripen; but their maturity is incredibly
prolific; and it is sorrow rather than time which matures
them. Then there is also a quiet painless stun of sorrow,
under which men walk about as in a dream, wliile all life
appears to stand still in ominous silence round them ; only
reversing the phenomena of dreams, these men rather have

340 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

a lack of faith than believe too much ; for they disbelieve
in all realities, no matter how practical or solid. Yet for
some men this stun is good; if not for more, at least for
a transition state.

Then there are others who are always wishing life away.
Our own hearts go along with these. We leave no place,
however beautiful, however endeared to us by a thousand
recollections, so much with regret as with the feeling
wherewith a man turns away from an enemy he has beaten,
and with whom he has no more to do. So much at least
is past. So much is over. Another chapter is done.
Another step is taken, which, thanks to Heaven ! is an
irrevocable progress elsewhere. Such men's associations
even are prophecies of the future rather than reminiscences
of the past. Their scenery is in heaven. It is their
native land, and the yearnings of their love of country
tend only there. Their local attachments are rooted in
invisible homes. Their very unrealities are not idle regret-
tings of the past, but calentures of heaven. Such are men
to whom all presents are weary, because all presents are
sorrowful. But, by way of compensation, to the same
men all pasts are presents, and no futures are disquieting.
Thus it is, that, in one way or in another, we have nearly
all made our professions of its faith, and are all picking
our way heavenward as best we can, under that softly-stern
vicariate of Christ, the apostolate of sorrow.

There is sorrow therefore even in Bethlehem. Though
it seems to be a place of pure joy, and fountains of joy
stream from it daily over the whole earth, there is a deep
sorrow in it also : a sorrow so universal that it makes all
its brightness pathetic. Although in the hearts of men
it must lie in light for ever, a thundercloud can hang even
over Bethlehem. But it is not merely the shade of a
distant foreseen sorrow which is cast over that sunny slope.

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 341

There is a real sorrow there, deeper than common human
sorrow, such a divine sorrow as belongs only to the mysteries
of the Incarnation. It will end, so far as Bethlehem is
concerned, in the wildest mother's wailings that have ever
wakened the echoes of the earth. We shall not rightly
understand the Sacred Infancy until we have walked and
mused by the shores of this great sorrow, seemingly so out
of place and season. A devotion, which is founded on the
Sacred Infancy as if it were simply the opposite of the
Passion, will neither be deep nor lasting. If it is not
altogether untrue, it is at least inadequate.

In order to see of what nature this sorrow is, how it
pervades all the mysteries with its universal presence, and
at the same time how congenial it is to them all, we must
begin by taking a survey of the world, as we may call it,
of the Sacred Infancy, the world of which Bethlehem is
the metropolis and centre. It is not a world of one idea
only, though one spirit is sovereign there, and gives to all
its diversified mysteries an obvious as well as an internal
unity. It is a world full of landscapes, both of a spiritual
and a material kind, out of which comes deep heavenly
poetry, and upon which heavenly poets form themselves.
Or we may liken it to a gallery of works of divine art,
from the study of which a supernatural beauty rises in the
beholder's mind, rises until it masters it and likens it to
itself. But no word-painting can describe the pictures that
are there. Fortunately for us, in all the mysteries of Jesus,
it is only necessary that we should indicate them, and then
the love that is in Christian hearts illuminates its own ideal,
and reproduces in itself the mystery.

Bethlehem itself supplies us with many of these sweet
pictures. We have the Birth at midnight, with the kneel-
ing Mother, and the adoring Joseph, the light of his red
dusky lantern blending with the white splendour that

342 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

radiates from the Little Infant on the floor, and the eyes
of the beasts in the shadowy background, which have
caught the reflection and are looking through the gloom.
No painter can paint it as it lies in the believer's soul, and
as the bells of Christmas wake it up in that gay winter
midnight, wliich is brighter than a summer noon, because
of the inward light by which the heart sees and worships.
While we look, we love and grow holy. Yet, as we are
gazing, the scene shifts as of itself, and we behold the first
adoration of Mary and Joseph, and the unspeakable smile
with which Jesus repaid their worship. The animals
have vanished from the dusky illuminated gloom, and, —
are they real faces, or only the outlines into which all
visible darkness wreathes itself? the ages, the ages of the
old Hebrew and heathen past, and the unborn ages of the
teeming future, are gathered round, muffled in vague shape-
less mantles, with their shadowy expressive faces, as if they
were summoned there to be representatives, or were pro-
jected out of the Heart of the Child or out of the soul
of the Mother by the very force of love and prayer.

Meanwhile, although we are looking inward to the head
of the Cave, the whole external world is somehow visible,
lying quiet in the cold star-light. We see Rome, with all
its stern life of government hardly sleeping, and all its
popular life of circus-loving indolence and wanton citizen-
ship sleeping off" its wicked wassaiL We see Athens, the
city of the bright-hearted, with its philosophers still at
their vigils, though they are not the giants that their
forefathers were. We behold Alexandria, whose nights
a thousand coloured lanterns turn to day, shooting fitful
gleams of unsteady radiance on one side over the waters
that flap against her mole, and on the other upon the white
sands, which are gemmed with palms, and where night-
breathing gardens fight with the encroaching barrenness.

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 343

We see the strange cities of the Chinese empire, seething
with population whose multitudinous souls provoke the
appetite of missionary zeal, and whose civilisation even
then was old and fixed. The haunts of many false religions
disclose themselves to us as we look, the shrines of Indian
worships, the oak groves and rings of stone of the Gaulish
druids, the Persian sun-temples on the mountain-tops, the
cruel sacrificial stones of the American Aztecs and the
huge hands of their idols filled with bleeding human
hearts. Over the wide forest, and the dismal steppe, and
in all the indentations of the sea, where the pagan pirates
dwell, Mary's worship seems to steal like a gentle breath,
and a responsive ray of light meets it out of the Infant's
Heart, and steals over all the earth, and mercifully takes
it for His own. Utter darkness there shall nowhere be
any longer.

Again the scene changes. The Cave re-adorns itself,
as if it were a living thing that had hands wherewith to
deck itself with images, as though they were jewels, and
it was but changing its apparel The shepherds come in
to worship ; and the faces of Jesus and Mary are both new.
They have got another kind of beauty now, differing from
the one they wore but a while ago. Moreover in this scene
the Babe is in the Manger, and the shadow of the Eternal
Father has fallen more deeply on Joseph, now that the
external world has begun to come, to serve, and to adore.
We can see sounds also in our spiritual pictures ; and we
behold the skies resonant with angelic melodies. The
heavenly sounds make the colours and the outlines speak.
Instantly all things have their meanings. All things wear
on their faces beautiful significances. We read as in a
book, but it is the book of the wisdom of heaven. Every
accident is a mystery. Every circumstance becomes an
allegory.

344 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

But this picture vanishes also. The Babe is no longei
in the Manger. He lies upon His Mother's knee. The
kings are there, dark-featured and gleaming in their oriental
bravery. How strange the gold and silver seem, the pearls,
the rubies, and the diamonds, giving a scattered light where
they lie in negligent profusion on the floor, and the casket
of frankincense with its gorgeous barbaric art, and the
silent myrrh that holds its tongue, yet says so much ! All
this splendour is harmoniously out of keeping with the
rough Cave, with its walls here and there glistening with
streaks of subterranean moisture, with its rugged angles
where the bats are wont to hang, with its littered straw,
and its projections polished with the rubbings of generations
of animals whose dwellings have been there. The snorting
breath of the ungainly camels is heard outside, and now
and then they jangle their bells in their uneasiness, as they
kneel upon the sward. The division of races, the history
of the Gentiles, God's secret witnessing of Himself in dark
places, the pathos of old primitive traditions, are in the
faces of the kings; and the countenance of that swarthy
one, the presence of a black in the Cave of Bethlehem,
is more than a moving incident ; it is pregnant with saddest
history, and yet with sadder prophecy. Once again the
scene changes, and Jesus is shedding His first drops of
Blood, whether it be by His Mother's hand within the
Cave, or by the hand of the priest in the synagogue upon
the hilL Close by, as through sunlit openings among the
clouds in famous pictures, we see the whole mystery of
redemption mistily revealing itself through a strong golden
haze, shapes of light lost in light, indistinct, yet fastening
strongly on the soul. Such are the pictures of Bethlehem,
and they might easily be multiplied.

The Desert is not less rich in the light-chequered monotony
of its landscapes. Look at it with the flush of sunrise on

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 345

its dewless sands. That misty blue line behind represents
the distant undulations of Judea's southern hills. Here and
there on the ground sparry stones glisten, like rain-drops on
the boughs ; but there are no rain-drops there. It is a weary
land which stretches out before us, flat plain with scattered
tufts of stunted thorny shrubs, or wavy hollows in whose
grooves no streamlet flows, but only a dry motionless torrent
of stones, as if they got together there for company, and all
as tawny as a lion's coat. There is a look of haste about the
flying figures of the Mother and the Foster-father. Yet no
garments are in disarray, or straggling out upon the morning
wind. It is a modesty of precipitation, such as once before
carried her so swiftly over the hill-country of Judea, and
which does no dishonour to the tranquillity of her holiness.
Her look breathes calm, even as she flies. Yet there is a
timid clasping of the Infant to her bosom, which is more
than the common embrace of an unanxious mother. Two
creatures flying with the Creator across the wilderness, and
invisible satellites far behind hunting the Creator to His
death, but baffled by a woman's speed, to whose feet a
mother's love, which is also a creature's worship, has given
wings.

The wilderness trembles in the mist, dissolves and changes.
The sun has ridden from east to west. There is a piece of
broken ground, either as if some time the fiery earth had
gaped, or as if the action of vehement waters had scooped rude
lineaments of itself round about. Under the shadow of a
cliff, which is not tall, but lies so low, that afar off the eye
would look over it without suspecting the undulation in
which it lies, there is a crystal well, a spring of modest
volume, and separate spikes of grass stand up like miniature
palisades in the sand, and some desert-haunting plants, with
brittle, fleshy stalks grow near, and in the cool shade are
Mary and Joseph resting. The shadow of the Eternal

346 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

Father has grown even yet deeper upon Joseph ; and some-
how, if we might dare to depict it so, the grace of maternity
sits more gravely upon Mary's brow. The Child visibly
understands it all, but is mysterious, and holds His peace.
The bird of prey that is floating over Him, like a spot of
gold struck by the sunset in the air, is as large as He, and
seems the more rightful master of the place.

Again — and it is now the heart of the wilderness. Even
the robbers have no homes here. It is a desolate spot,
remote from the track of the caravans. It is the dead of
night. But there is no silence. The wilderness has many
voices. It would puzzle us to know where they come from,
but they do come, sad, moaning, and inarticulate. Is it the
wind grating on the sand 1 Is it the sobbing of the reedy
springs taken up by the quiet night from a thousand places,
and breathed through a tube of darkness as if it were one
murmuring note 1 Is it the sighing of the distant palm-trees,
blending their solitary whispers into one 1 Is it the clefts of
the rocks that make organs for the wind ? Is it the very
earth sleeping uneasily, and dreaming of its own desolate
sterility 1 Or is it the joints of the great world that are
creaking in the silent night, like a distant tramp of men
walking upon snow 1 It is a strange lullaby for God. The
moon shines down upon the group. All Three are sleeping,
sleeping in the arms of solitude, in the midst of creation.
God is sleeping between His two chosen creatures, the Son
between the shadow of the Father and the shadow of the
Holy Ghost. Who then is watching ? In the bright
darkness of the upper air we feel a Watcher, to whom our
very thoughts dare not give any form. Is it His presence
that makes the elements and inanimate things wail, as if
tliey were in suffering, and were striving to let no sound
of suffering escape '

But now it is bright morning. The day is fairly advanced

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 347

Into the hours when even the winter's sun is incommodious
there. The Infant is being changed from Mary's arms to
Joseph's. The angels press round with envy. It is but
an incident of the journey ; yet it is also a mystery. Mary
is without her Child, and we think of Calvary, the Garden-
tomb, and the House of John. Joseph is bearing the Babe,
and has now grown so vivid a shadow of the Eternal Father
that he almost startles us into worship. The immense
Word filled the whole Bosom of the Eternal Father. He
nestles well now in one comer of Joseph's bosom. Behind
him, visible only in uncertain aerial outlines, follows a pro-
cession, a pageant of grand and gorgeous apparitions, at
which we gaze in breathless awe. It is the historical
priesthood of the whole long-enduring Church up to the
last ordination before the day of doom, and the young priest
who will have but one mass to say. Popes are there, with
their meek faces overshadowed by their tiaras ; bishops
whose countenances beam with masculine holiness, looks
of paternal softness unbending the austere lines of science
on their brows ; priests also, men of manifold gifts,
fountains of sacred light, sparkling with the strange inven-
tions of self-crucifying charity, hearts large as oceans, men
that knew how to multiply their lives a hundred times for
souls, the diversity of whose eloquent lineaments, silently
speaking as many tongues of love as there are languages on
earth, is controlled into unity by one pervading, sovereign,
air of tenderness, as if they were the sisters of souls rather
than their rulers.

All these with countless pure-faced Levites, and youthful
ministers beautiful in boyisK chastity, mingling the impulses
of a free graceful artlessness with the self-controlling
happiness of a downcast bashful mien, — all these are
ehadowily following Joseph as if they were his one shadow
variously multiplied, while he bears the Infant in his arms.

348 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

They follow, not in the sinuous bends of a festal pageant,
but like a broad serried band of Roman soldiers marching
on the straightest road. The Face of Jesus looks the
meaning of it all, but is as silent in His swaddling-clothes,
as the Blessed Sacrament is upon the corporal.

Time seems to pass, and a river to lapse invisibly at our
feet There is a mirage near the head of the Red Sea.
But its palaces fall, its palms totter and break, and its blue
lagoons shiver, and part, and show the true scenery beneath.
It is the wilderness again. The Three are treading the
wilderness. This time they are all treading it. There is
no Infant. The Boy is at their side. He keeps up with
them in a kind of running walk, and does penance by it,
and deceives even Mary, that she may not find it out. The
breezes of Judea are blowing in their faces. The leagues
of hot sand have not sucked up the breath of the thyme,
with which it was laden as it blew over the pale green
sward and pastoral grounds of Judah and of Benjamin.
Joseph is aged ; and the shadow of the Eternal Father is
yet deeper on him. There is a fuller heart in Mary's face,
as of one who has been living so much longer in the awful
intimacy of God, Calvary is meeting Bethlehem in the
Boy's Soul, and there is something eternal in His eyes
which comports itself marvellously with boyhood ; and the
clear speaking of His tones seems to make even the desert
silent, as if it wished to absorb them in its loose sands, and
keep them in its bosom as a compensation for its barrenness.
Sunset and dawn, midnight and noon, wind and calm, storm
and shower, darkness and starlight, ride over the wilder-
ness, like the wind-driven cloud-spots on the mountain side,
and vary its pictures almost endlessly, and in the heart of
each picture sits a mystery, of whose beauty the generations
of men will never tire.

Egypt is not less fertile than the Desert in images of

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 349

beauty. "V\Tiat are these white walls which are laved by
the flood when it is out, but otherwise rise out of that
luxuriant green flat of densest herbage, sward so inveter-
ately green that it seems proof almost against the scorching
of the Egyptian sun 1 It is Heliopolis. We will enter on
the evening of its pagan holyday. All the morning there
have been endless sacrifices. All the day there have been
crowds of worshippers. The streets are full of people. The
evening star will rise upon the grave riot of an Egyptian
festival. Towards sunset there is a pause in the streets.
The multitudes stand still. It is as if a mighty city had
been paralysed by some dreadful shock. A fearful dubious
rumour has gone forth, stilling all that noisy populace, so
that men could hear each others' hearts beating. A
moment's pause, the multitude sways uncertainly like a
huge tree in the first blast of the tempest, and then
rolls onward to the temples, in waves and waves of
men, pressing upon each other as billow chases billow
up the sand. As the sun was sloping, while the lan-
terns were just being lit, while the incense was smok-
ing tranquilly before the idols, and the sacred doves
were settling themselves to roost in the plane trees of the
outer courts, the images of the gods fell without warning
from their bases with a hideous crash, and are lying
mutilated and in fragments on the ground.

Not a tremour of earthquake could be felt. The marble
pavements have not given, nor one slab been raised. The
air was so still, there was hardly a breath to set a broad
plane leaf turning on its little unwieldy pivot. What
omen is this? What fearful unlooked-for anger of the
Sun ? Meanwhile some pilgrims are entering the city-gate
unnoticed. Who would notice pilgrims on such a day
as that, when every town of Egypt, the ports at the
Nile-mouths, the dwellers above the cataracts, even the

350 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

peasants from the distant oases, had gathered to the
sanctuary of the Sun? Through streets, silent, vacant,
in the rear of the multitudes that have rushed to the
temples, Mary, clasping to her bosom her slumbering Child,
follows Joseph faintly and wearily to the khan to find a
corner amidst its crowded inmates, or to find all places full,
the old experience of Bethlehem.

The streets of Heliopolis come before us on a later day.
Mary is carrying the Infant in her arms. It is a many-
coloured scene. Crowds are moving to and fro, buying
and selling, in parties or alone. Every one, it should
seem, must be intent upon his own occupations. Strangers
are no strange things. Sanctuaries and pilgrimage-places
are hardened to the sight of strangers. Yet somehow that
Jewish mother and her Child draw all eyes upon them.
Every one looks up, and follows them with his look, so
long as they are in sight. It is something more than
beauty which overflows the countenance of the Child.
There is an attraction in Him which will not give an
account of itself. He is like a light in a dark place, an
apparition that fascinates the beholders, and awakens deep
nameless emotions in the heart, which are akin to worship
and religion. The dark eyes of those bronzed faces cast
wild looks upon the glorious Child. There is something
in them which makes the Mother tremble instinctively.
She has no superstition of the evil eye; but she looks
onward to another crowd in another place, to other wild
eyes cast yet more wildly upon her Love upon a far
darker day than these days of exile. She folds Him to
her bosom, as if they were going to rob her of Him, when
it is truly, and she knows it, only the fierceness of their
admiration which so lights up their swarthy features.

He also seems to feel the presence of that pagan multi-
tude, and in some way to resent that which causes Hia

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 351

Mother fear. He gazes on the people unblenchingly, as if
it were in the bold simplicity of infancy, not without deep
love, yet with something flashing kinglike in His air. He
even stirs in her arms uneasily, as if He would defend her,
and take her part against that multitude. His face is set
like that of a young eagle in a storm, beating up against
the channels of the wind : another sort of beauty from
that which He will wear, when He is driven to and
fro, like a hunted thing by the maddened populace of
Jerusalem.

The Egyptian city rises up before us again with its
narrow streets, its quaint bazaars, and the menageries of
its multitudinous temples. It is now indeed, as its name
imports, the City of the Sun; for the true Sun is there,
and the place looks darker for His shining. Over the hot
Nile-valley antiquity broods like a cloud. The old fortunes
of the people of God rest there like a shadow. The
ancient plagues of the unbelieving king still seem to load
the air. The river is as silent as a river in a dream.
There is an atmosphere of fate over the picture. The
bright lights seem burdened with something which is not
bright. In an alley of high walls, near the city gate, in a
dim street with buildings so tall that the sun lights it only
in its meridian transit, is Joseph's dwelling of poverty and
exile. The implements of work lie round about. But
there is a pause. Mary has suspended her spinning.
Joseph holds in his hand the piece of wood he was fitting
to another. Their eyes are fixed upon the Child, who is
on his feet upon the ground, but clinging to the lap of
Mary's garment Of Himself, unpersuaded, unexpected,
without a pattern sedulously given Him to mimic, He has
spoken His first word. Perhaps it was the Name of God,
perhaps His Mother's name. Because He was Himself
God, skilful in the craft of love, exquisitely considerate m

352 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

the inventions or compassions, we will deem it was His
Mother's name. Look at the eyes of the Mother and the
Foster-father. An earthquake might rend Heliopolis in
twain, and they would not hear or feel. The glow of
ecstasy, puzzled but not disquieted, is on their features.
The Word the Father spoke eternally now has spoken
Himself. Who would dare to think that even Mary
taught the Word to speak? The cloud of silence broke
suddenly from before His mind, as from off a mountain
top, and the little house at Heliopolis was flooded with
refulgence. The very sound gave light. The very light
played music. The ears of those two had heard the mid-
night Gloria of the angelic choirs; but it had no such
melody as this. It well-nigh called their souls out of
their bodies, it was so wonderful. To that picture we
listen rather than look.

It has passed away. Evening has come down upon the
land, the brief evening. The Nile glows like a glossy
creature, swift, broad-backed, and almost noiseless, in the
crimson sunset. Only at the edge the quick waters make
the reeds twitter a little, except in the little earthy bays
where the lotus-lily rises and falls at anchor quietly, just
tremulously enough to shake its odours out upon the air,
like incense from the thurible. The incarnate God is
musing on the bank, Mary withdrawn a stone's throw from
Him, as if she had felt it was His will, and yet with-
drawn less far than the apostles at Gethsemane. Her
gaze is as fixed upon Him, as an angel's look is fixed
upon the Vision. His mind opens before us, as if a
sanctuary were being unveiled, and it flows out of His
eyes, as they are bent upon the stream, and catch the
reflection of the golden light from the shining waters. In
the scarce audible murmur of the river He hears the cry
that rang through Egypt in the night, that terrible night

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 353

of the first-born. It is as if the echoes of that wail
had been undulating over the desert ever since. The tears
gather in His eyes ; for He thinks of Bethlehem, its
mothers, and its Innocents. But He hears now in the
stillness, while the evening breeze scarce waves its indolent
pinions over the sun-shrivelled land, the trampling of
countless hurrying feet. It is the children of Israel going
forth in the darkness upon their Exodus ; and there is the
Exodus of a whole world to be accomplished now, and
it is He who must cleave the sea, and how shall it be
cloven? The twilight deepens. Almost suddenly it is
dark. The eyes of the Child have gone out in the
darkness, and the wind rises, and the mist gathers on
the stream.

Once more we see Him in the early dawn passing
through the gate of Heliopolis after Joseph's dream. The
freshness of the morning is on the Nile. The sails of the
boats catch the sun above the high banks of the river.
In the faces of all the Three, there is a sense of freedom
after imprisonment. The brightness of a return from
exile breathes in every feature. The careworn look is
gone. The step is elastic. It is morning in their souls
as well as morning on the outside earth. They are like
those who have had a recent message from heaven. They
have a glory round them, like wreaths of angels manifest.
The pagan faces have been a grief to Joseph. They were
a dread to Mary. They breathe more freely now that
they are out of the city of those dark men, and away
from the strange closeness of the dim bazaars and many-
latticed walls. They are now like the singing-birds of
the woods and fields, free, and living on the providence
of their Heavenly Father, to find food on all roadsides,
and to drink of the brook in the way, and to sing that
perpetual voiceless song which a quiet heart is always

354 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

singing in the ear of God. But there is something more
in the Boy of seven years old. The growth of His
Humanity seems to betray the Divinity more and more,
as if it had more room to display itself, and anticipated
each new human gesture, and made it all divine. The
light in His clear eyes is deep, and in their depths are
mysteries. Jerusalem is in His Heart. There is a desolate
green hill outside its gates which is a magnet to His Soul.
There is the same wonderful look upon His boyish Face
which amazed the apostles so much in Him when He
hurried along the road to Jerusalem, as if to be in time
for His Passion, as if it might else elude His thirst for
suffering. That look upon His Face is printed now on
Mary's heart, and overflows her face as well. Those
two faces belong to Calvary. Upon the face of Joseph
there still rests the old tranquillity of Bethlehem.

Nazareth also contributes to this land of the Sacred
Infancy many fair scenes, in truth, a complete pictured
theology of the Incarnation. We often come near to rest in
life, and then are cheated of it, and after that we reach a
better rest through disappointment, better because it was
not our own choice, and better, as it proves, in its very self.
Such seems to be the significance of that holy calm which
shines on the features of Mary and Joseph, as they draw
nigh to Nazareth after they have been disappointed in their
desire of dwelling at Jerusalem. I should not say disap-
pointed ; for there are no disappointments to those whose
wills are buried in the will of God. With the Boy also
Jerusalem is to be delayed. Yet on His Face there is the
same intense tranquillity, as if the coming rest sent its peace
before it into soul and countenance. All Three wear the
look we might expect to see on the faces of those who are
first entering heaven. There is no trouble, no surprise, no
voice, no jubilee, but a flush of peace, arising from the

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 355

intensity of joy kept down and deepened by the nearness to
God, and the momentarily expected Vision. Even to those,
whose souls are God's sanctuary on earth, Nazareth is itself
a sanctuary, to be approached with awful memories.* It is
the dread scene of the Incarnation ; and now it is to be the
home of Jesus for many uneventful years, whose uneven tful-
ness, if we could read it rightly, is the most eventful page in
all creation's history. Its glory now consists in its being
the harbour of the Boy, and the witness of continual hidden
wonders. For eighteen years each day, which to us seems
to have been but one brief waving of time's soundless wing,
will teem with wonders inexhaustible even by angelical
intelligence. Quiet sequestered Nazareth, which the green
hills sentinel so pleasantly, how didst thou suck in those
three tempest-tost souls, as the harbour draws in the ships
with the setting of the tide ! Look upon those faces.
Calvary seems further off than ever now ; yet there is some-

* Sister Mary of Agreda has many remarkable passages in the Mistica
Ciudad on the Holy Land and the Holy Places. She says that the faith-
ful have a special light, over and above tradition, to keep them right
about the sites of the Holy Places, p. ii. 1. iii. cap. xvi. — that devotion
to the Holy Land is a hidden support to catholic kingdoms, p. ii. 1. iv.
cap. xviii. — that our Lady j^rayed that catholics might always have the
sanctuary of Bethlehem in their hands, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xix.— that heathen
and misbelievers gain temporal blessings from living in the vicinity of the
Holy Places, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xxiv. — that the faithful also, and especially
the Franciscans, get graces from living there, p. iii. 1. vii. cap. xvii. —
that the angels who now guard the Holy Places are the same as those to
whom our Lady spoke when she visited the Holy Places from St. John's
house, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. i.— that a hidden force against demons has been
communicated by our Blessed Lord to the Holy Places, p. iii. 1. viii. cap.
vi. — that the last time our Lady visited the Stations she made especial
prayers for all those who should hereafter do so, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. xviii.
— that on the same occasion our Lord descended to her on Calvary, and
on the spot promised her He would be very liberal of redeeming grace,
that she kissed the ground, and made a beautiful apostrophe to the Holy
Land, that she gave the angels fresh charge over the Holy Places, and
that the sins of men have forfeited the peculiar custody of the Holy
places which she established, p. iii. 1. viii. cap. xviii

3S6 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

thing which speaks of it in the eye. It is not forgotten.
It is only waiting. In Mary there is a look of reprieve. In
Jesus it is steadfast calm, and a certainty which needs not
to be precipitate. Joseph has the air of age musing con-
tentedly on the pleasant place which it has chosen for its
burial. Altogether a complicated contentment is the ruling
genius of the picture.

Then the interior of the Holy House comes before us.
We behold the outer chamber of the house, and Joseph's
shop ; and the green swelling hills are seen through the
open doorway. Mary is seated in the doorway spinning,
though at that moment her work is arrested, and Jesus is
near her, looking fixedly at some doves that are feeding in
front of the door. The Mother is gazing upon her Son in
astonishment ; yet it is an astonishment which is passing
rapidly into adoration, and every moment we expect to see
her at His feet. She does not know exactly why this is.
Yet it is not new there. There have been times like this
before, times when His apparent growth in wisdom and
grace have dawned upon her, and come home to her,
through some look or gesture seemingly trivial in itself. It
is just as with mothers, whose eyes, however love may
quicken them, do not see their children grow, but who wake
up now and then to the fact that they are grown, and that
some sweet interesting change has taken place in them. It
is the hour of one of those heavenly surprises now. Mary
looks as we might fancy an angel would look who has been
gazing on the Beatific Vision these thousand years, and now
for the first time sees something new in God, which yet
was always there. The creature rather than the mother
is working in her features.

Let the scene change to the inner room, where Jesus
sleeps. It is just after the return from Egypt. Mary
has helped Him to undress, and has arranged Him in His

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 357

bed. Her face glows with a loving familiarity, as if the
very offices, in which her fingers had been engaged, made
her heart more free. He has been forward in His caresses,
those caresses which become more touching to a mother
when childhood is passing into boyhood, as if they were of
more value because they are more conscious and deliberate,
and perhaps more rare. Her heart is overflowing with an
earthly mother's love. Yet there is some contradictory look
in her eye, something which controls love, but does not
lessen it. It is not as if she had for one moment forgotten,
or as if she otherwise than calmly realised, her Son's
Divinity : but it is as if love and worship were not always
like two rivers blending in an inland lake, but as if they
sometimes alternated in quiet waveless tides, as in a land-
locked bay far up in the embrace of mighty hills, yet
whither the sea travels with his ebb and flow. She looks
less the creature, and more the mother now.

There are many pictures also which remain to this day in
heaven, painted upon the unforgetting intelligences of the
angels, of which the scene was Joseph's shop. The common
litter of a carpenter's working place is there. Boards
propped up against the walls, pieces of wood lying over each
other in all shapes and at all angles, the floor strewn with
chips, and straight lines of sawdust under the place where
he has been sawing, various tools mingling in the apparent
confusion, and mutilated implements of agriculture lying
outside the door : this is the scene which presents itself, and
Mary is standing in the doorway of the house hard by.
Joseph is showing Jesus how to do some work, and his broad
man's hand is laid on the small hand of the Boy, and is
gently guiding His fingers. He is doing it mechanically ;
for he is gazing rather on the Saviour's face than on the
work. He sees the Boy all resplendent with glory, and his
faith recognises in Him the omnipotent Creator, the Eternal

35? CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

Worker, who so deftly fashioned the countless worlds, and
whose fingers he, the aged carpenter, is now venturing to
press, to guide, and to manipulate as he wills. The old
man's soul overflows with adoration, but tranquilly, without
wave or sound, as if fed by silent springs from underneath.
Nevertheless he does not desist from guiding the hand of
Jesus. He does not interrupt the lesson, which he knows
to be so little needed. He is too humble for that. He
understands his office. It was incomprehensible to him
always from the first. The exercise of his authority could
never be otherwise to him than the exercise of a sublime
obedience. Then, as his soul swells with adoration, self-
abjection falls over his features like a veil of light, as the
sun breaks the clouds and unrolls his splendour down-
wards from the brow of the hill to the vale beneath
His humility so clothes him with majesty that he looks
almost godlike, and his age is transfigured into a semblance
of eternity.

As He is older now, and stronger, the water-pitcher is
not too great a weight for the Creator of the world. Yet it
bows Him forward, and makes Him tread with a difi'erent
step, as He climbs up that grassy path with His burden.
Many are coming and going from the well. All have a
word to say to Mary's Son ; and He answers, sometimes
with a word, more often with His eye. All are contented.
He is a silent Boy ; but there is something in His presence
in that little town, like the sun in heaven, whose shining
and obscurity makes more difference to man and beast and
herb than words can tell. Women with their pitchers upon
their heads stop, and turn, and gaze upon Him, and then
sigh with envy at Mary's lot, contrasting it with secret
sorrows of their own in which their sons bear mournful
part. The rough manners of the Nazarenes soften, when
^he sunbeam of His smile is on them. Cold hearts warm,

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 359

and hard hearts grow gentle, and anger dies away, and all
are divinely unmanned as He comes among them.

He is already a king, a little king of men's hearts,
crowned in the love and loyalty of the most boorish village
in all Syria. They have crowned the Boy ; but they will
uncrown the Man, when His royalty becomes a serious
thing. He knows this already. He looks at them with
more than sorrow, with more than love, with an indescrib-
able yearning which attunes all His features. They have
made Him king : but for their sakes He is rather longing
to be priest The water as it gurgles in the pitcher is like
a heavenly temptation to Him. His thoughts are onward
upon Jacob's well and the woman of Samaria. His thoughts
are over all the world in countless Christian fonts. The
Blood in those veins must mingle with the water in that
pitcher, before it will cleanse the sins of Nazareth away.
The thought is an ever-present one with Him ; yet His
Heart leaps up now as if it were new, and the face of the
Boy broadens into the countenance of the Man of Calvary,
and, almost mastering the characteristic sweetness of His
youth, it is clothed, as with a fire, in the mature beauty of
the Redeemer.

But is Jerusalem nowhere in the landscapes of the
Sacred Infancy*? Let us go back to the day when the
fortieth sun rose upon the new-born Babe. The early dawn
had seen Mary and Joseph wending their way from
Bethlehem to the Holy City. It was the clear cold of a
bright spring morning. The dewdrops glistened like dia-
monds on the grass, and the palms as they waved flung off
their harmless crystal showers on the passers-by. Jesus
lay a seemingly unconscious Infant, now in His Mother's
arms, and now in Joseph's. White in the morning light
were the terraces and towers and temple roofs of magnificent
Jerusalem, growing like a natural growth from the dark

36o CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

edges of its steep ravines. He looked upon it all from
out the envelopment of His swaddling-clothes, as a bird
looks on a human face from the leafy covert which fringes
and conceals its nest. The Passion is in His eyes. The
very separate scenes of that terrific drama may be read
there, even when in their liquid lustres the buildings of
Jerusalem were mirroring themselves with soft impression.
It was as if, in the grandeur of a heavenly vision, some
glorious poet, or mighty warrior, or high-souled statesman,
were allowed to see that sublime thing for which he was born,
that world-wide work for which he was to live, that grand
end for which all life was to be but scanty measure.

There would be much in such a vision to terrify; but
the sublimity of terror is the increase of courage to noble
souls ; and how superb would be their look as they gazed
on the bravery of their success, yet saw meanwhile that by
the universal law their greatness must be their martyrdom !
Yet such was only the groundwork of the light that shone
in those infantine eyes. It was only the human element
which beautifully ranged and reconciled itself there with
the divine. It was the invisible Soul become visible in
the swaddling-clothes. The Body had almost disappeared,
effaced by that deluge of inward light.

The Mother goes up to sacrifice. Let us follow her to
to the temple ; for never before was sacrifice like this.
It is the interior of the temple. A strong light falls upon
the central figures. The others are lost in the very in-
distinctness which the contrast of the strong light causes.
Simeon and Anna, and a group of holy souls — we
know that they are there, but they are only shadows,
broken outlines. They take up no room in our eye.
Joseph is the silent presence of the Eternal Father, wit-
nessing, ratifying, accepting, overshadowing the sacrifice.
In this mystery Joseph is rather part of heaven than of

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 361

earth. He is more a symbol than an actor. He fulfils his
office as shadow of the Everlasting. There is Mary, and
the Child, and the Priest. This last seems rather to be a
type of priesthood than an individual priest. His linea-
ments are manifestly ideal. He is the representative
shadow of invisible and sacerdotal power. So much of
Joseph's office he usurps for the time, while Joseph is
intent upon that higher one. His very garments are
embroidered allegories. He is not a human figure. Mary
is giving away her Child, and putting Him into the arms
of the priest. The spirit of sacrifice is going from her
countenance like rays of light. She seems to rise into the
air, and to widen with majestic grace into colossal dimen-
sions. The Mother's heart shines through the magnificence
of the glorified heroine, not as if it were outshone, but as
if its light were magnified by that other radiance through
which it shines. There is no struggle. Her will does not
resist the will of God, yet neither is it overlaid or effaced
by the Divine Will. It is present ; it is unquenched ; its
pathos is inimitable ; but it is subject, subject with the
most free and meritorious subjection, seen through the
transparent will of God, which never oppresses the glories
it over-rules.

Victims have a beauty of their own, a beauty not the less
touching because it is for the most part dumb. The poor
sheep is glorified in the eyes of art, not so much by the
garland of flowers that hangs about its neck, as by the
circumstances round it, the priest, the temple, the sacri-
ficial knife. But the beauty of this Victim, the glory of
this mute Infant, is all His own. In His eyea, which
look so many volumes in each single glance, we read His
perfect knowledge of the unutterable justice of God and
the all-holy greediness of its requirements. His Mother
is lifting Him into it as into the mouth of a devouring

362 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME,

fire. But His Soul is on fire already with the promp-
titude of His own human will, and it almost out-glows
the furnace of that eternal will which is opening to
receive its victim. Love yearns more to be sacrificed,
than justice to consume the sacrifice. We remember
another scene far olf. It was when the Son hung upon
the Cross, and put His Mother away from Him that He
might be poor with the perfection of poverty. He had
given Himself to His Father, and could not offer Him-
self again, and so He offered His Mother in His stead.
It was a scene of cruellest magnificence. He was the
Bacrificer there, and she the Victim, They had simply
changed places. This picture in the temple was the oppo-
site of that on Calvary. She was the Sacrificer here, and
He the Victim. Yet was He not also, and especially, the
Victim on Calvary ? How marvellously all mysteries are one
mystery, because they are divine !

Twelve years are gone, and the Boy kneels as a wor-
shipper in the temple. His single kneeling figure is all
we picture to ourselves. But alas ! where are the words
to say what it is we seel Is it all the realm of angels,
with the manifold beauty of their choirs, expressive, in
ten thousand diversities, of the almost infinite spirit of
adoration? Is it the beauty of all heaven, caught up by
God, and cast into one point of exceeding light, and then
doubled in the eyes of Jesus 1 No ! that is not all. Is it
then the beauty of all holy hearts throughout the earth
and the earth's ages, worshipping their Heavenly Father in
their gladness, in their sorrow, in their pensiveness, in the
fortitude of their humility, under all the never-repeated
variety of their pathetic circumstances ? Are all hearts
worshipping in that heart, and all the world's worship
working in that radiant countenance 1 No ! there is also
more than that. There is the indescribable fulness, the un-

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 363

imaginable repose, of the worship of the Sacred Humanity,
encompassing the majesty of God, enveloping each and all
of His lightning-like Attributes, and bearing on itself, as
the great tidewave bears the sun-struck foam upon its crest,
all the worship of angels and of men up to the foot of the
Eternal Throne, ever rising, ever falling, ever giving light,
like the spray in the dark night-time, upon the Eternal
Shore.

Let us look again. It is two hours past noon, and there
is a gathering of the pilgrims at the gate of Jerusalem,
through which the road goes northward. Joseph and the
band of men are together, and Mary and the band of
women. The two companies will travel separate till night-
fall. There is something of the picturesqueness of an
encampment about the meeting-place ; and the faces are
all fresh, and seem to witness to the soul being in a state
of grace after the spiritual renewal of the feast. Between
the two bands the Boy Jesus passes like a wandering
sunbeam, with less of notice than we have ever seen Him
receive in any other picture. He withdraws and is not
missed. There is a spell on Mary's heart, a viewless band
over Joseph's eyes. He stands in the shadow of the gate,
and sees the company of women start, to be followed in
another hour, and by a different route, by the troop of
men. The Boy clings to the City, as if it were His Mother,
as if those rugged ravines were the very skirts of her
garment. 0 Jerusalem, and thou wert such a mother !
The vision of the Holy City, as He saw it that February
morning twelve years ago, is graven on His Soul. He saw
it by the Nile-bank. He came home from exile with it in
His Heart. He drew near to it, and Joseph was warned
in a dream to take Him from it. He will wean Himself
now from Mary and from Nazareth, or at least will seem
as if He were bent on doing so; for His doings are un-

364 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

fathomable just now. No one yet has sounded them, 01
unriddled their significance. Hereafter the tempter from a
mountain-top shall show Him all the kingdoms of the earth,
their pageants and their treasures, and His eye shall wander
coldly over them from the summit of Quarentana. His
covetousness is of an exclusive sort. Sufferings and souls
are the only treasures that He craves. But the vision of
Jerusalem, its stones to His prophetic eye already stained
with blood, its streets ringing with the furious acclaim
which met Pilate's appeal to the popular compassion, the
crisp rustling of the old olive trees in the neighbouring
Gethsemane, the bones whitening in the sun on the pale
turf of Calvary, this was a more tempting sight than that
from Quarentana. It drew Him from Mary's side. For a
triduo at least, like the triduo of His Passion, He will beg
His bread, a heavenly mendicant, in the streets of Sion,
and lay His delicate limbs on the rude pavement. He will
have the very stones, which He will one day mark with His
Precious Blood, leave their marks now on His yielding
Flesh. Yet, as He stands in the shadow of the gateway,
His eye follows His Mother's figure till it disappears, and
there are many things, which seem contrary yet not con-
flicting, eloquently speaking out of those eyes, whose
language is more easily to be read because their brilliance
is softened in the gateway's shade.*

Once more we see Him in the temple. He is in the hall
of the doctors, the school of theology. The gravest men in
Israel are gathered round Him ; almost every form of
wonder is depicted on their faces, while their limbs are
perfect studies, because of the various ways in which their

* Among the number of beautiful things in Sister Mary of Agreda,
the following is anaong the most beautiful, — that our Blessed Lord had
in His Mother all the intimacy and perfection He had wished for from
the whole human race, and of which our sin had disappointed Him.
Mistica Giudad, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xxix.

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 365

attitudes express the intensity of their attention. Angry
wonder blends with sweet surprise, and zeal, that needs but the
spark to fire its train, mingles with the only half -intelligent
delight which illuminates the features of some of the aged
men. But on many faces there is the beginning of a
look which can darken some day into the darkness of an
awful cruelty. The door of the hall is half open, and Mary
and Joseph stand there, not amazed, not petrified into
statues, but in unspeakable repose, as if they had had to
journey to the world's end and had got there now, and there
was nothing more to do and no further to be gone ; for
they had come to Him, who was the end of all worlds. As
to Himself, never was the bashfulness of His Boyhood more
obviously, more winningly displayed, than now, when the
Creator was sounding the intelligences of His creatures, and
sprinkling them with a shower of His own celestial wisdom.
He was asking questions, who was in Himself the sole
sufficient answer to all questions that could be asked. He
was seeming to learn in order that He might more sweetly
teach. He was blamelessly deceiving, that the seers of
Israel might behold the truth. More and more He grew
like a Boy, as more and more the light of the Godhead
within Him was burning away the thin veils of flesh and
blood. Surely in another moment He will bloom into con-
fessed, undoubted God, and the life will be scared out of
their stricken souls. The angels remember Him as He was
at that astonishing moment, to Mary's love and Joseph's
faith manifest God, to the others a wonder, a portent, an
anigma, a suspicion, yet to all of them a not unchildlike
Child.

Words indeed have golden pencils ; but there are un-
explored regions of the Sacred Infancy which no limning
of language can portray. The act of the Incarnation
under the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost is practically

366 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

as hidden from us as the Generation of the Son up in
the inaccessible sources of eternal light. The nine months'
life in the Bosom of His Mother, evidenced outwardly
by Mary's haste and by the sweetness of her song, by
Elizabeth's salutation and the jubilee of the Baptist re-
deemed before his birth, was a succession of spiritual
pictures which we cannot imagine, but of which it is no
mean knowledge to know that such things were. When
we regard Him also, wherever He was during those twelve
years, as the centre of the world's government, environed
by multitudes of angels, giving laws to all the phenomena
of nature, shedding power, and life, and endurance into
all things, holding them up above the hungry abyss of
nothingness which is ever threatening to engulf all finite
things, playing upon the manifold strings of. His immense
providence, and encircling every existence in the universe
with the warm clasping ring of His creative love, we
see indistinctly into another vast region, of which we
can discern nothing but its vastness, while our instincts
testify to the necessity of its being also extremely beauti-
ful. His Soul too had a spiritual scenery of its own,
which nothing but His own light could by some super-
natural process transfer to our intelligences. Much also
from time to time reveals itself, to the meditative eye,
out of the operations of grace in the souls of Mary and
Joseph from contact Avith Him. This also belongs to
the Sacred Infancy, and throws light upon its marvel-
lous creations. But these are unexplored regions, on
the one hand not to be attempted, on the other hand
not to be forgotten.

But one thing is true of all these pictures. The
shadow of Calvary rests upon them all. Everywhere
the sunlight is i itercepted. There is not one patch in
one landscape on which the unimpeded sun may sleep,

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 367

as on a bank of flowers. The shadow is universal. Denser
here, and thinner there, it is unequal, but it is ubiquitous.
The Passion is the unity of the Infancy. Calvary gives
its character to Bethlehem. It is strangely gifted for a
shadow ; for it makes both the light and shade of all the
pictures. It withdraws from the eye what it would have
us see but indistinctly. It thrusts darkly on our notice
what it would not have us fail to sea It is the atmos-
phere of the Infancy, impressing its peculiarity on the
scenery. It becomes familiar to us, intelligible to us,
dear to us, by the colourless medium of that soft shading.
But it was not merely an outward thing, a haziness
hung upon the hills, a twilight sent to mellow, a memory
that usurps an empire over the eye, or a foresight that
tinges the imagination. Calvary was the real inward
life of the Sacred Heart in the Infancy. It was more
the Babe's home than Bethlehem. There was indeed an
underground world of ecstatic joys beneath the sorrow;
but it was jealously hidden, like a divine thing, which
is meant to transpire rather than to be seen. Neither
was the shadow on Himself only, but on all around Him.
It transfused itself into the heart of Mary ; for how could
she see by a dififerent light from that with which He saw 1
It penetrated into the heart of Joseph. The Venerable
Jane of the Cross tells us that Joseph was allowed to feel
all the pains of the Passion in a mystical way, as some
of the saints have done.* But the shadow stole every-
where, just as the twilight creeps noiselessly into even-
ing's sunniest nooks, and quietly masters all the land
without the winnowing of its silken wing being heard
or seen. Everywhere there was shadow, and it was one

* Sister Agreda has also a remarkable passage on the knowledge of
the Passion infused into Joseph at the time of St. Simeon's prophecy.
Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. 1. iv. cap. xx.

368 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

shadow, the shade cast by Calvary, a low hill indeed, but
tall enough to cast a shadow that should gird the globe, and
come round to rest on the same dear height from which it
had been thrown. The Sacred Infancy may almost be defined
to be, — The Passion in Repose.

There is indeed at first sight an apparent contrast
between Bethlehem and Calvary, between the Crib and
the Cross. Neither can we truly say that it is only
apparent. No two mysteries of our Lord are exactly
alike. They are full of analogies. A unity of spirit
reigns over them all Yet no one is the mere double of
another, or the repetition of it under difi'erent picturesque
circumstances. Nevertheless the apparent contrast between
the Crib and the Cross is much stronger than the real
difference. The region of Bethlehem seems to be the
abode of almost perpetual calm. There is the placid
littlenass of the Infant; there is the gentleness of the
meditative Joseph ; there are the maternal joys of Mary,
too deep for utterance ; there is beauty, sweetness, softness,
something attractive to the genius and eye of art. This
is all broken up by the storms of Calvary, and Joseph
has disappeared. In the world of the Infancy we have
almost total seclusion from men; in the world of the
Passion Jesus is the central figure and suffering victim of
a wild and infuriate multitude. In Bethlehem, and up
to the city-gate at twelve years of age, we behold Mary's
unbroken jurisdiction over Him ; one of the sorrows of
Calvary is her inability to help Him, or even to minister
to the thirsting Sufferer the ministries of a common
charity, to say nothing of the offices of maternal love.
Seemingly at least there is in the Crib an absence of
bodily pain, while the Cross and the antecedents of the
Cross are remarkable for an unutterable excess of it. In
the times of the Infancy those who loved Him were

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 369

always with Him, and, when He had to fly, it was those
He loved who fled with Him; in the times of Calvary
those He loved abandoned Him, until at last, after He
had given away to Mary that sweet apostle who was her
second Joseph, His solitude became without a parallel;
for He Himself had put His Mother from Him, and the
Eternal Father had forsaken Him. When the Infancy
and Boyhood came to a close, miraculous manifestations
of the divine complacency preluded to the opening of
His Ministry, as He came up out of the waters of Jordan ;
whereas the very last step in His Passion was the agony
of a divine dereliction. These things make a strong
contrast between the Crib and the Cross, and they are
surely more than mere appearances, more than simple
varieties of scenery.

Nevertheless, in spite of this indubitable contrast, there
is a real inward identity between the two. In the Soul
of Jesus prevision was not simply a great gift of prophecy.
What we learned of His science in the last chapter will
show us that there was a reality in His prevision of the
Passion which made it a substantial Passion already. The
bodily pains were anticipated with a vividness, which, if
it did not rack muscle, nerve, and flesh as the reality was
to do, at least transferred a proportionate agony of fear
and trembling and natural horror to His shrinking Soul;
while the spiritual tortures of the Passion were not so much
foreseen at Bethlehem, as actually begun. Inasmuch as they
had not to be learned, and could not be aggravated by any
new occurrences, there was no reason why they should not
be felt from the first moment of His Conception. Indeed
some contemplatives tell us that Jesus sweated blood re-
peatedly during His Infancy. Moreover Calvary presided
over Bethlehem. The mysteries of the Cross exercised an
acknowledged sovereignty over the mysteries of the Crib.

370 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

These last were not ends. They were roads which had
to be travelled, things which happened on the road, land-
scapes seen from it. They had no direct share in the
accomplishment of the great work of redemption. Blood
was to be shed, shed till it was all shed, shed until life
oozed out with it, and the sacred union of Body and Soul
was dissolved. This followed from the change which sin
superinduced upon the first idea of the Incarnation. Had
the Word come in a purely glorious Incarnation, an Incar-
nation which was to crown Creation, and had no Redemp-
tion to effect, perhaps the act of His Incarnation, and His
beginnings of a created life among His creatures, might
have seemed more wonderful to the eyes of men than the
triumphal Ascension with which His appointed years would
have concluded, an Ascension which would not then have
been reached through any gates of death. Death would
have been but a phenomenon of the animal kingdom, un-
known to immortal men. But now the eyes and hearts
of men will gather where their hopes are, around the dim
scene of Calvary, and the sacrificial horrors of the Cross.
Yet even now the operation of God is more manifest in
the mysteries of Bethlehem, and the operation of man in
the mysteries of Calvary. In the one God works, in the
other He suffers. In both He is active, and in both He
is passive ; yet, if we may venture to say so, we see
more of His activity in Bethlehem, and more of His
passiveness on Calvary. Bethlehem is what the Creator
does to His creatures : Calvary is what His creatures do
to Him.

The will of the Child was the same as the will of the
Man. The will in Bethlehem was identical with the will
on Calvary. There was the same intense desire of suffer-
ing, with the same deep dread of it. There was the
same weight of sin, torturing His sensibility with its cruel

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 371

load. There was the same anger of the Father to be
endured, perceived with the same clearness, apprehended
with the same fulness of science, an ungrowing anger
which would not increase with the years of Jesus, and
which did not require the co-operation of human cruelty
in order to make itself felt within His SouL His Mother,
in whose life He lived the dearest part of His own life,
was already the Mother of Dolours, though as yet she
had not stood on Calvary. Her nine months of expec-
tation had not been unchequered gladness. The immensity
of her science, and the light which to her glowed per-
petually on the page of Scripture, alike forbade it. Her
forty days of peace at Bethlehem had their shades of
sorrow, which, although they were shortly to be deepened,
were still palpable shadows. But, since the prophecy of
St. Simeon, the seven swords had been planted in her
bosom, and they could never be drawn out now for
eight and forty years, almost half a century ; for, if
they were drawn out, she would bleed to death. In
both the Mother and the Son the dispositions of sacrifice
and oblation were absolutely the same. Inwardly there-
fore there was complete identity between the Crib and
the Cross. It only needed act, to transfigure Bethlehem
into Calvary.

There was even much outward analogy between the two.
The Bethlehemites rejected Him in the person of His
Mother, as the Jews afterwards rejected Him in His own.
He had scarcely made Himself visible on earth, when He
had to fly from His own creatures, because His life was
deemed incompatible with their interests, just, as in His
Passion, His death was pronounced by the spiritual autho-
rities of the nation to be expedient for the people. No one
can meditate on the mystery of the Presentation without
being often reminded of Palm Sunday. His Infancy had

372 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

there its one brief triumph, before the Face of the Babe
was snatched away and hidden in the solitudes of the
wilderness and amid the crowd of Egyptian idolaters. Anna
bore Him witness, and Simeon sang Him a song of triumph
as meek and childlike as His own infantine sweetness.
It was in the same temple where the little children in
later years cried Hosanna after Him, giving tongues, as
He implied, to the very inanimate stones that were almost
breaking forth to praise Him. If, from the hill-top on
the road from Bethany, He saw the morning on Jerusalem
and shed His memorable tears, may we not suppose also
that His infant eyes were suffused with the tears of mani-
fold emotions, when He saw Jerusalem from His Mother's
arms that February morning? From the coasts of Egypt
He drew near to Jerusalem ; but under Joseph's authority
He turned aside. It was not time. So afterwards did He
hide Himself when the others were going up to Jerusalem.
He would not go up yet, because all was not ready. To the
mystery of the Circumcision His Sacred Infancy owed its
privilege of shedding blood, which is almost its most striking
analogy with the Passion. On Calvary He involved aU near
Him in the darkness and anguish of His sufferings. Mary
was steeped in woe. Magdalen and John were broken-
hearted. The poor fugitive apostles were overwhelmed with
darkness, and with the bitterness of love self-disappointed
and self-ashamed. Peter was even driven to deny Him.
Persecution awaited all. It was the same in His Infancy,
At that time He involved in all His sufferings His blessed
Mother, His aged Foster-father, and even a helpless multi-
tude of slaughtered Innocents. A dark-bright ring of
suffering lay wide around Him, wherever He moved, like
a halo round the moon.

It is so even now. It will be so to the end. The vicinity
of Jesus is a privilege of delighted grace, for which nature

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 373

has to pay dearly. In the triduo of the Passion He was
separated from Mary three days ; and it was a like tridno,
marked by the same separation, which brought the Infancy
to a close. The Resurrection followed the former triduo ;
and the eighteen years of hidden Nazareth which followed
the latter triduo are full of analogies with the forty days
after the Resurrection in many ways besides their hiddenness.
Thus even the outward analogies between Bethlehem and
Calvary are neither few in number, nor insignificant in
their mystery.

In the Hght of theology and in the fire of devotion,
Bethlehem and Calvary are continually blending into one.
There is no more strongly marked peculiarity of theology
than the way in which it unites distant truths, harmonises
remote mysteries, and identifies things which in matters
less divine would seem irreconcileable, if not contradictory.
In the doctrine of our Lord's Divine Person, we see how
Bethlehem and Calvary were one to Him to whom time
can bring nothing, and to whom the Three-and-Thirty
Years were but as a golden point, which to us, when it is
beaten out, and far from beaten thin, can cover the whole
world with its magnificence of manifold mystery. The
immense science of His Human Soul, and His full use of
reason from the moment of His Conception, remove from
His Sacred Infancy all those imperfections which seem
at first sight incompatible with His prevision and antici-
pated experience of the Passion. What we know of the
exquisite sensibilities and delicate perfections of His
Humanity relieves us from all suspicion of exaggeration,
even when we look at Bethlehem in our own minds as an
unbroken Gethsemane. The doctrine of His ungrowing
grace secures for us the fixity of His interior dispositions,
by which mainly it is that Calvary is so imperceptibly
and inseparably dovetailed into Bethlehem. The most

374 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

probable opinions about Mary's science already invest hei
amply in the mantle of her dolours ; and so, her science
involving her heart in the darkness of the great tragedy,
His Heart is involved with hers. The two hearts beat
in each other, and cannot beat otherwise. The two lives
of the Mother and the Son cannot be disentangled,
without many an unseemly rent in the sacred vesture
of theology. Moreover the doctrine of His use of reason
makes the Infancy already a Passion of itself, with a
peculiar tragedy of its own distinct from that of Calvary.
For it had pains and perils, sufferings and penances,
belonging to itself, and these, which to a common infant
would have had all the imperfect consciousness, unantici-
pated occurrence, rapid transition, and speedy oblivion
common to childhood, were to Him, with His full use of
reason, perfect grown-up sufferings, with the additional
uneasiness of physical infirmity, and voluntary speechlessness,
and all the self-imposed disguise of infancy.

But, if the Crib and the Cross so blend in the light
of theology, they are completely fused together in the
fire of devotion. They both produce the same spirit in
the soul, though they produce it variously. The spirit
of Bethlehem is one of contrition, of mortification, and
of expiatory reparation; and of the same sort is the
spirit of Calvary. It is as natural for devotion to weep
by the Manger, as it is to weep by the Cross. Thus, in
all the saints and holy persons who have had a special
attraction to the Sacred Infancy, it has been a pensive,
pathetic devotion. It breathes the same lowliness as
Calvary. There is the same fragrance of self- abjection.
It drives the sense of sin as deeply into the softened
heart as the scene which the moonlight of Gethsemane
discloses. The Child Crucified and the Crucified Man
on His Mother's lap are the echoes of each other, soundless

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 375

echoes seen, rather than heard, by the eye of piety. The
love caused by both mysteries is the same. It is the love
of exceeding pathos, not like the love of the Resurrection
or of the Hidden Years at Nazareth. Even the very
dififerences of Bethlehem and Calvary reach the same end,
though it be by opposite roads. They go round the world,
one by the east, the other by the west They exhibit Him
crucified, and they produce an inward crucifixion in the
soul. They both land us in an abnegation of ourselves.
They both regenerate us in a mystical childhood. Both are
ways of tears. Both are gateways through which only
littleness can enter. Both envelope us with the spirit of
Jesus, and unclothe us of all that is vile and ignoble in our
own. They both express themselves in the same outward
symbolical reality, speaking the same language at the same
moment in one awful and indivisible voice, — in the Mass
and the Blessed Sacrament

But we must go somewhat more into detail with the
suff"erings of the Sacred Infancy. They may be divided
into four classes ; its outward penances, its inward penances,
its states of life, and the peculiar virtues it was called upon
to exercise. Its outward penances were its least ; yet they
form a darksome lot for the first years and helpless tender-
ness of the Infant God. The Babe of Bethlehem shed
many tears, and they flowed from manifold sources of bitter-
ness deep down within His SouL They came of heart-
sorrows, such as were portions of His inward penances.
But they came also perhaps — for who shall limit His con-
descensions 1 — from pain and feebleness, from inconveniences
and wretchedness, which His extreme sensibility did not
exaggerate to Him, but enabled Him alone of babes bom of
women to feel in their uttermost reality. Pain, which seems
tlie same, is in reality not the same to any two sufferers.
Its painfulness is varied by the delicacy and susceptibility

376 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

by the illness or the soft-heartedness, and even by the
momentary circumstances, still more by the inward con-
sciousness, of him who suffers. Now not only was there
never one whose humanity was so finely fashioned, so
unspeakably susceptible as our Blessed Lord's, and therefore
never one to whom any pain was so intensely painful as the
very least pain was to Him ; but also there was never one
whose inward feelings, self-consciousness, or rather self-
possession, made corporal pain so full of agony. We touch
on the doctrine of His Divine Person when we say this, for
His self-possession was part of the Hypostatic Union.
Moreover, except to Him, and perhaps to our Blessed Lady
in some measure, yet a measure so far below His as scarcely
to resemble it, never was it given to any child to feel the
fulness of a child's capability of pain, or of childhood's
peculiar pain from its delicacy and sensitiveness ; because
the child's powers of mind are dormant, and perhaps two-
thirds of bodily pain are due to the intervention of the mind.
In our Lord's case the full use of reason and complete
maturity of soul were superadded to the weak impression-
ableness and delicate frame of childhood. This would give
Him a peculiar fountain of tears, which without meditation
we should be slow to understand. This was His first
outward penance. Tears were to Bethlehem what Blood
was to Calvary. They were the blood of His Childhood,
which yet was not without shedding of blood itself.

In all His penances we must bear in mind what we have
said of His tears. Both the immensity of His Human
Science, and the union of His Human Nature with a Divine
Person, were sources of suffering, which made the least pain
an agony, and His agonies were something too gigantic to be
compressed in any words borrowed from the nomenclature
of human woe. Tears were His first penance : the second
was the endurance of cold. What suffering cold can cause,

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 377

and how peculiar are its agonies, the annals of arctic adven-
ture sufficiently testify. Yet none of those brave discoverers
and hardy seamen, who succumbed on the plains of ice or
snow, which might be sea or land for all they knew, ever
suffered from cold as the Babe of Bethlehem suffered,
whether from the cold in the Cave, or during His precipitate
flight across the wilderness. Cold moreover was but the
representative of other natural powers. His own elements
made lashes of themselves to scourge the Infant Body of
their Creator.

If Calvary was the Passion which His reasonable crea-
tures inflicted upon Him, Bethlehem represents a Passion
in which His inanimate creatures were the executioners
of the Baby Victim of the World. It is a touching
mystery, — this subjection of the Omnipotent to the feeble
stings of His own senseless ministers. His own laws of
nature pressed Him, even to hurting Him. He was
pinched by the cold, and burned by the heat, incommoded
by the light and disturbed by the wind, jaded by fatigue
and distressed by noise. The seasons rode over Him in
their course, and left the prints of their hoofs upon His
Flesh, as they do on ours. To us these are the incom-
modities of a fallen nature ; to Him they were mysteries
of the Incarnation. They were realities, at once blessed
and dreadful; dreadful from the awful contact between
Himself and them ; blessed, because they were divine satis-
factions, sources of grace, fountains of indulgences, and
sufferings of meriting and atoning power.

Poverty has been called by some the sister of Christ,
by others His bride. This was His third penance; and
it was no doubt one of the penances of His predilection.
It would seem as if the circumstances of His Infancy had
been providentially contrived with a view to bringing in
as many of the incidents of poverty as were possible with-

378 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

out seeming to be unnatural. From Nazareth to Bethlehem,
from Bethlehem over the wilderness to Egypt, from Egypt
to Nazareth again, and from Nazareth to Jerusalem for
the three days during which He begged His bread, the
biography of His Childhood spreads itself, like an ample
net, to entangle in its wide folds more and more of the
varieties and pressures of His beloved poverty. If He
was bom of a royal maiden, it was of one who was poor
and reduced in circumstances. He would not be born at
home, but took the occasion of the Roman census to be as
it were a child of exile, and a waif upon his own earth.
He would be rejected from the doors of Bethlehem, as the
least worthy of all the mixed multitude that had crowded
thither. He would be born in a cave, a stable, amidst the
domestic animals of man's husbandry, — He who had come
to till the hard earth of souls and make it fertile with His
Blood, to be Himself the ploughman and the bleeding
ploughshare also. The poverty of the wilderness, the
poverty of the foreign city, the poverty of narrow straitened
toil at Nazareth, all these He essayed, and suffered from
them all far more than we can tell. When age grew on
Joseph, and his infirmities multiplied, the yoke of poverty
became yet more galling to the shoulders of his tender
Foster-son. The poverty that pressed on Mary pressed
tenfold more heavily on Him from the very fact of its
having first pressed on her. Poverty is an evangelical
perfection. How many have gallantly tried to bear the
burden, and have had to lay it down again in sadness and a
not unsanctified despair ! How many who have borne it to
the end have been made saints by the simple burden ! How
many religious orders attest by their ingenuous chronicles
how hard it is to keep alive the spirit of truthful poverty,
and how weak even vows are found to be in stemming
the current of nature which runs so strongly the other

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 379

way ! Never was there a childhood of hardier poverty
than our Blessed Lord's. It was His inseparable com-
panion, and, if He loved its austerities with so singular
a love, it was only because they were so singular a
cross.

Neglect was another of His infant penances, neglect
varied by the scarcely more flattering notice of cruel perse-
cution. He loved men with the tenderest love. From
eternity it had been His delight that He was one day to
be thus among them. He had come ; and His sole presence
so beautified the earth, that it might almost have out-
shone the highest heaven. For was not the beauty of
God Himself all freshly beautified by the Incarnation?
Yet, in every sense the words can bear, there was no
room for Him. Hearts were full. He was unseasonable.
The miseries, from which He came to emancipate His
brethren, were not felt as miseries by them. His efforts
to liberate them were more irksome than the bondage
under which they suffered. He was bom, and some shep-
herds came to Him; but none of the neighbours seem to
have followed the example. Three kings arrived from
afar, and the tyrant of Judea strove to include Him in
a wholesale massacre, while oblivion and obscurity rapidly
gathered over the history of that royal progress from the
east. There was safety for Him, only when the unpeopled
sands of the desert were stretched around Him, and even
there the footprints of the dear men, for whom He came
to die, were terrors and portents to His Mother's eyes.
For the Sacred Heart of the Incarnate God to be a stranger
to any child of Eve was an incomparable sorrow to His
philanthropy, His man-lovingness, an affection which be-
longed to Himself in a sense in which no creature can
share it, and which is only shadowed by His saints in burn-
ing zeal for souls. If it were possible, the word pJnlan-

38o CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

ihropy, like that of the Incarnation, should be studiously
kept sacred for Him alone, the man-loving Son of God.
Yet He was a stranger in the land of Egypt; and His
Heart was in captivity, as Israel had been before, in the
valley of the Nile. When His Soul yearned for Jerusalem,
there were none to welcome Him there. On the contrary,
He must turn aside ; for they, who had power there, were
sure to wish Him ill. Poor Child ! Poor Boy ! men fell
off from Him, who was the uncreated beauty of heaven,
as if there were a charm of evil hung around Him even in
His Childhood, as if a Cain-like brand were on His Infant
brow ! Who shall fathom the deep sorrows of the Babe's
Martyr-Heart ?

His Bloodshedding in the Circumcision was another
penance of His Infancy, which for many reasons may be
regarded as a pattern for the unnecessary mortifications
of the saints, if indeed any mortification can be strictly
deemed unnecessary even for the most innocent of the sons
of men. He needed not the rite. He required no cere-
monial covenant with God, who was God Himself. That
flesh needed no consecration, which was already united to
a Divine Person. It was a strange, separate, unaccountable
Bloodshedding, standing, as it seems, in a peculiar relation
to the other Bloodsheddings, as it was not only no part of
the redemption of the world, but was utterly detached
from the Passion.* It did not keep the compact with the
Father, which was death, and nothing short of death. So
that the drops that were shed were not shed to the saving
of souls. Was it the homage of the Infancy to the
Passion ! Was it, like the Bloody Sweat upon Mount
Olivet, an outburst of the Sacred Heart's impatience for
the plenitude of Calvary? To Himself truly it was pain,
to His Mother sorrow, to Joseph a heavenly perplexity,
* See Treatise on the Precious Blood, chapters L and v.

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 381

to the Angels a wonder, to the saints a pattern and a
mystery.

His weariness was another penance of His Infancy.
The weariness of the unfatigued Creator is a marvel full of
pathos ; and to tired souls, and fatigue in these days is the
normal state of Christian souls, it is full also of consolation.
What weariness did He not endure upon His comfortless
bed of prickly straw, and in the restraints of His incom-
modious swaddling-clothes 1 His very helplessness was itself
an unending weariness to Him, because of the maturity
of His reason. Weariness must have been one of the
especial sufferings of His Flight into Egypt, and also of His
Return. In His Flight the confinement of His bands and
the monotony of His posture must have been insufferably
irksome, hour after hour, and day after day, even though it
was the gentle arm of Mary that bore Ilim. Perhaps also
the very maturity of His mind may itself have fatigued
His infant Body. His sleep too, a region of wonders, was
it a real rest ? Did it refresh Him, as our sleep refreshes
us 1 Did it relax the stiffened limb, quiet the beat-
ing heart, lull the busy brain, strengthen the weak eyes,
and fill the little vase of life full of new bounding lightsome
vigour, as it does with us? His Soul lay wide awake
the while. His prayer and oblation never ceased. He
saw always the olives of Gethsemane; He saw always
the pillar and the crown ; He saw always the Cross
against the sky on Calvary. Was His sleep per-
chance only another form of weariness, a shadowy time
more haunted by the images of the Passion than even
His waking hours 1 All we know is that He allowed
Himself no joy of any human thing, except what in
each case was indispensable to the perfection of His
Humanity.

Fear was another penance of His Infancy; and, as the

382 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

sujBfering of fear is usually proportioned to the giftednesa
of a man's soul, to our Lord it must have been intolerable
agony. His Flight into Egypt and His sojourn there were
full of terrors, some which we can understand, and some
which are beyond the reach even of our imagination. It
does not seem that we can suppose His science to have
exempted Him from these impressions, when we know
how He was ever keeping back from His inferior nature all
those succours which could in any way diminish His suffer-
ings. He used His privileges as ingresses to new modes of
suffering, or to more exquisite degrees of suffering. "We
should therefore suppose in this matter of fear that, out of
the union of a mature reason with feeble infantine suscepti-
bilities, His science would find the means of increasing the
pains of fear, by enabling Him the better to appreciate
dangers. We shall find that fear occupied no insignificant
place amidst the horrors of His Passion, and we should
therefore expect to find it in His Infancy.* But we have
purposely enumerated it among the outward penances to
show that we are dwelling on those painful impressions of
flesh and blood, which are the products of fear, rather than
on the inward trouble of soul which the imperfection of
science would have caused. Even if He did not fear. He
might suffer from the impressions of fear in that mysterious
manner in which so many of the infirmities of our nature
were made compatible with the Hypostatic Union. Per-
haps even the distressing panics of childhood were not
inconsistent with the maturity of His reason. But, in all
these questions, what theology most imperatively requires of
us is that we should leave intact the perfection of His science.
Silence has always ranked amongst the austerest of
monastic penances. It requires long proof an 1 many a
mark of divine vocation before we dare trust an heroic
* Sp« tli« Treatise on Calvary, chap. iv.

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 383

Boul to the observances of a silent order. Silent men are
men that hide themselves in God after a most awful fashion.
They even withdraw themselves from the admiring rever-
ence of the Church by making the processes of their
canonisation almost impossible. For many months the
Infant Jesus only broke His silence by inarticulate sounds
of pleasure or of pain, perhaps of the latter only. Yet how
He must have longed to speak, who was so marvellously
eloquent? Must He not have yearned to give forth light,
in whom the whole communicative wisdom of the Godhead
was comprised? When He was so full to overflowing of
beautiful wisdom and ravishing intelligence, must not silence
have burned in His Heart like a coal of fire ? Must there
not have been something in His being the Father's Word,
which would make Him exult in speaking of the Father
with His human tongue ? When He gazed with speechless
jubilee on Mary, did He not long to gladden her with the
music of His voice ? Did she not look for His voice now,
as during the nine months she had looked for the appearing
of His face 1 When He saw Joseph pale and tired, was He
not full often fain to cheer the heart and revive the droop-
ing spirits of the aged saint by the magic of an articulate
word 1 Yet He refrained. He had put on the disguise of
Childhood ; and, by His perfect observation of it, the disguise
became a divine reality : nay, it was a human reality as well,
used as a disguise, yet truly no mere disguise itself. Be
sure that silence never pressed on saint in calm Carthusian
cell, or in garden-girdled hermitage of Camaldoli, as it
pressed on the Sacred Heart of the Infant Jesus.

We should reckon also as a separate outward penance,
what enters into all the other penances, as an ingredient,
namely, the extreme delicacy of His Body, divinely pur-
posed, expressly fashioned, for keenness of sufiering. It
may be considered in itself as a distinct suffering apart from

384 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

the way in which it heightened all His other sufferinga
For we must believfc Him to have been so exquisitely sensi-
tive, that many things were torments to Him which would
not have been torments to us ; and many things, which are
indeed painful to us, would become in Him pains of quite a
different character. The very winds should have blown
gently on Him, the very rain drops have fallen on Him
without their weight, the very ground have smoothed itself
beneath His little feet. Yet so far from this, we are to
behold omnipotence coming to the succour of incredible
love, and holding this frail frame together amid a tempest of
woes within and barbarities without, that were enough to
quench a hundred human lives.

Such were the outward penances of the Sacred Infancy.
We pass from them to consider its interior penances. As
His bodily penances were nine in number, we may also
reckon nine of these. The first was His view of the
sins of men. As the soul is to the body, so was the
sensitiveness and sympathy of our Lord's Soul to the
delicacy and susceptibility of His Body. Even to us
with our common gift of faith the word sin is a real
terror. It expresses a whole world of darkness. It is
the negation of all that is bright, hopeful, desirable, or
attractive. The possibility of our sinning is a thought
to make us tremble. The likelihood of our sinning is
our deepest fear; and our actual sin is by far our most
real unhappiness. Yet we can scarcely understand the
shrinking heavenly-mindedness, which caused saints to
faint away at the bare mention of the name of sin.
Such a fact is an index to us of sublimities of love and
of union with God, which are to us little better than
terms of mystical theology, respectfully believed in, but
out of the range, not only of our experience, but of our
comprehension also.

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 385

How far then are we from being able to fathom our
Lord's horror of sin*? The uncreated sanctity of His
Divine Person had communicated to His Human Soul
an unspeakable spotlessness, together with such a tender-
ness regarding the honour and purity of God as it is
impossible for us to picture to ourselves, except in the
most inadequate manner. If we might venture to think
of disease as an emblem of a thing so holy, we might
say that the wretched and unclean world was to our
Lord's shrinking Soul what the meridian beam of the
sun would be to a wounded eye. It was something in-
tolerable. It was a spiritual agony, seemingly unendurable
for a moment, yet actually endured His whole life long.
If surprise could have found place in the Hypostatic
Union, His Soul would have been appalled by the
revelations which His science made to Him of sin. They
were unmerciful overwhelming revelations. He saw the
sins of men in the horror and foulness of their kinds,
in the classes of their loathsome varieties, in the mani-
fold uncleanness of their separate characteristics. He saw
them in the frightful array of their number, their multi-
plication, their relapses, their prolific families, their long-
enduring self-procreating consequences. He saw them in
their weight, in the weight by which they pressed souls
so low, in the weight by which they had almost oppressed
the mercy of God under the feet of His justice, in the
weight by which they were crushing Himself every
moment. He saw the sin of sins which enabled Him
in the Passion to expiate all sin, the sin of deicide, the
murder of God, the martyrdom of the Creator. Thus He
had to bear the weight of His Passion twice over, once as
the Passion, then also as a sin or series of gigantic sins.
He had to expiate His own Crucifixion.

For aU this was not a mere vision of a terrified and

2 B

386 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

tormented spectator. He had to take all these ineffable
sins into His own Heart, and as it were violate the inviolate
sanctity of His Soul by clothing Himself in them, making
them fit tight to Him and burn into the very sanctuary
of His life. Gently and sweetly come the surges of the
angelic chorus out of the lofty skies to His ear in the
Cave; but the vision of all that sin is there. The palm
whispers and the sands of the wilderness steam us with
golden smoke in the slant rays of the setting sun : but
the vision has dogged Him there. The lotus is slowly
opening its fragrant pitcher to the rising sun upon the
tremulous bosom of the Nile ; but the vision of sin has
fastened on Him never to be shaken off till death. He
is speaking kind words to the women of Nazareth at the
well, and the songs of the vine-dressers are rising gaily
in the morning; but the joy of His Soul is muffled in
this masterful vision of sin, which holds Him down, and
seems as if it would stifle that inward purity which is
the breath of His very being.

His Soul beheld God. It gazed into the very burning
centre of His eternal justice. It came nearer to the fires
than ever creature came before, or shall ever come again.
The flames of an unspeakable divine indignation leaped out
upon it as if it was their prey, invested it and seemed to
feed upon it, as though it were their fuel. It was uncon-
sumed because of the Hypostatic Union. But the fires
would have withered up any created nature if it had not
been impregnable and indestructible because of that sur-
passing union. Nevertheless it was a created Soul, and it
must have shrunk inexpressibly from this vision of the
justice of God. Here also, as in the case of sin, it was not
merely a vision. He was the victim of that justice. It
was to prey upon Him until it satisfied itself. It was
preying upon Him at that hour. It could not be evaded

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 387

It was His own will ; yet was it not on that account less
terrible. For such sins what justice had to be appeased?
By such sins what adorable consuming wrath had been
holily excited? God's illimitable sanctity was to be the
breadth of the expiation He had to make. The very vision
of it was like a living thing. It laid hold upon His Infant
Heart, bore it away to inaccessible rocks where neither
human help nor human sympathy could come nigh it ; and
there like a vulture it fed upon it, taking a pleasure in
staining its plumage with the blood as if it were thereby
beautified. What manner of life must His Infant Heart
have lived with such a dreadful guest, with so adorable a
terror 1

His foresight of the Passion was another penance of
His Infancy. Who does not know the pain when a single
tliought is stronger than the whole mind, and brings the
entire life into bondage to itself? It is a pain which
cannot be endured for long. Yet the possession of the
soul by a single sorrow is even a more intolerable lot.
Under such circumstances life is not so much lived, as it is
worn away, or gnawed piecemeal, with slow, dull, inex-
tinguishable pain. But there is another lot which is even
more dreadful than either of these. It is when some dark
thought, some phantom, whether of terror or of guilt, seizes
upon life, and makes it all its own, shuts the soul up in its
own gloomy, sounding galleries, and haunts it there with a
perpetual malicious ghostly haunting. Yet these are all
faint figures of the possession of our Lord's Soul by the
foresight of His Passion. When we muse upon it we lose
ourselves. We would fain disbelieve in its reality. We
cannot bear to think that such a life was ever lived on this
fair earth of God's. The outward tumult of Calvary is
positively a relief after the thought of that insufferable
silent woe. If we attempt to follow it into the sweet

388 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

mysteries of His dear Childhood, to accompany it as it
runs downs, as on electric wires, into all the faculties of Hiu
Soul, and to watch it mingling with His love of God, of
Mary, and of men, it becomes not only insupportable, but
absolutely unthinkable.

His foresight of men's ingratitude brings us to another
of the sufferings of His Childhood, intense, but more
within the compass of our understanding. We are happy
now, because here we seem as if we could get near to Him
with our pity. The tenderness of His Sacred Heart was
perfect, in the fullest sense of the word. No one had ever
been gifted with afifections like His. There has never
been a sensitiveness which could be thought of alongside of
His. In their strength, in their depth, in their fidelity, in
their delicacy, never had human afifections been so divinely
impassioned. They borrowed strength, as it were, from His
science. The purity of their vehemence was from His
surpassing sanctity. His human love was a thing by itself,
a marvellous chaste fire, a might of vehement tenderness,
to which there is no similitude in creation. But it was
divine also as well as human. No little measure of that
yearning and abounding love, which the Creator alone can
feel, was communicated to the affection of His Human
Heart. Hence no love of mother, wife, or sister was ever
for passionate softness like to His. But it had set itself
especially on one created object, the love of men. He
craved their love with all the mysterious appetite of the
Creator, adding to it the peculiar romance of a human heart,
and that new love, half human and half divine, which
belonged only to Him as our Redeemer. Yet it was in
this very one thing that His love was baffled.

He saw how few would love Him, how few even of the
few who served Him would serve Him out of love, how
coldly they would love who loved at all, and how many who

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 389

truly loved would fall from that love through the preference
of an unworthy love. It was all as clear to Him in the
days of His Childhood, as ever the history of the Church, as
it unrolls itself in successive centuries, could make it. What
blight is there upon human happiness worse than that of
unrequited love, especially when it is a love which has
beautified its own object by its own excess, and so been its
own cause and origin, and when no knowledge of new
unworthiness in the object gives a shelter to the wounded
affections in the sense of having been deceived 1 Yet with
such a woe was His Infant Heart continually pining.

There have been heroic hearts among men, who have felt
the sufferings of others more than they felt their own. But
the Sacred Heart of Jesus in an unexampled perfection
possessed this heroism. The sufferings of those He loved
were continually before Him. He saw the desolation of
His Mother's heart, as her dolours grew daily in the light of
Simeon's prophecy to their dread amplitude. He saw the
slow martyrdom of dear St. Joseph, whose quiet nature
seemed so unfit to suffer, that the sight of his sufferings was
a peculiar distress, as when we look on some unnatural
cruelty. He saw the fearful austerities of the Baptist
issuing in a bloody martyrdom. He beheld the Holy
Innocents, every one of whose separate pains His Infant
Heart felt more keenly than the sufferers themselves or their
wailing mothers. Here again His science furnishes merciless
light to His shrinking soul, while His power of light adds
intensity to His power of suffering ; and to all is superadded
the exquisite pain of knowing that of all these sufferings of
those He loved He was Himself the cause.

His ineffable spouselike compassion for His Church, and
His keen sympathy with all her subsequent vicissitudes,
was another fountain of bitterness in His Infant Heart. The
vision of countless Christians, who should carry into the

390 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

endless fires of hell their thousands of frustrated graces, and
of divine purposes which human malice had been free to
fracture, was also another vision which was always before
Him. It lay before Him, that dreadful homeless home of
so many souls, as a miserable world of His own disappointed
and rejected love. When His childish eyes were smiling
with infantine wiles into the eyes of Mary, that vision lay
close upon His Heart, breathing its fiery breath upon His
gentleness. "We must add too, as a distinct penance in
itself, the wearyful continuity of all these pains, sleeping
or waking, clinging to His sensitive Heart like the burning
garment of Greek mythology, whose potent drugs enabled
it to eat into the quick of life with gradual but unsleeping
fire. We must remember too, what the doctrine of His
science teaches us, that these fiery visions did not succeed
each other with a fearful interchange, which would have a
semblance of relief because it was interchange at all, but
they were all equally before Him at all times, ever present,
ever claiming the entire breadth of His attention, ever
exhausting the whole depth of His power of suffering, ever
illuminated by the whole light of His science, not the least
of whose ofiices it was to be a life-long instrument of
torture.

The very forms of life, or states and conditions of His
Infancy, were forms of penance. He had taken upon Him-
self the form of a servant. The swaddling-clothes were Hia
fetters. He was born a subject of the Roman emperor,
renouncing His own birthright. His life was one of the
most utter helplessness, from His infant weakness to His
not coming down from the Cross. Throughout it all He
was the butt of men, and the spectacle of angels. He put
Himself at the mercy of the animals and elements. Yet
these were but outward shows of the inward bondage in
which He was to the justice of God, to the sins of men, to

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 391

His own passionate holiness of love, and to their unspeak-
able ingratitude. He took upon Himself also the form of a
sinner. For He was clothed in flesh like other men, and to
be like them was content to have a reputed human father.
He underwent the rite of Circumcision, that He might look
still more like a sinner, paying to God a debt which was
only due because of sin. The purification of His Mother
was like a public and ceremonial acknowledgment of His
shame. He even allowed Himself to be redeemed by doves,
as if He forsooth needed redemption who came to redeem us
all. Toil and pain, fatigue, infirmity, and death, were all
consequences of sin, and to all of them He submitted Him-
self as never man was subject to them before.

Yet here also these were but outward signs compared
with the form of a sinner which He wore deep down in His
Soul before the eye of God's exacting jealousy and justice.
He took upon Himself also the form of a sufferer. Or
indeed it was a reality, rather than a form. All forms with
Him were realities. Suffering was the condition of His life.
It was the unseasonable companion of His Childhood.
There was no moment when He was free from it. He told
St. Catherine of Siena that during His Infancy He suffered
especially every Friday. For there might be degrees of
j)ain, in spite of the steadfastness of His science and the
immutability of His love. His science and His love were
not the only fountains of suffering which He had within
Him. As He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of
the world, so, in the eyes of the Father and in the terrible
realities of His own Heart, He was the Crucified Jesus even
from the days of Bethlehem. His sufferings exceeded all
martyrdoms, even in each single hour of His infant life.
He expressed this truth when He appeared to Domenica del
Paradiso as a Babe all wounded.

The three virtues of His Passion were also the three

392 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

virtues of His Infancy; and the heroic exercise of them
furnished the occasions for the fourth class of the penances
of His Childhood. These virtues were obedience, humility,
and patience. He was obedient with the perfection of
obedience to the Eternal Father, to the pagan emperor, to
Mary, to Joseph, and to Herod. When we remember who
He was, and what and how great were the privileges of His
Human Soul, we shall understand how wonderful this virtue
of obedience was in Him, and how heroic its exercise to His
science, which perceived from one point of view its most
divine incongruity, and to His love, when it came to involve
others, as it mostly did, and especially His beloved Mother,
in Its difficulties. To subject Mary to the journey to Beth
lehem, to her repulse there, and to the vileness of the Cave,
was a marvellous act of obedience to the Roman government,
the absence of which would have seemed to no one an
imperfection. To be turned from his course, as an autumnal
leaf is wafted aside by a breath of wind, by the miserable
Herod or Archelaus, was a strange indignity for the Incar-
nate Word. But it came within the requirements of the
perfection of His obedience. It would be endless to enter
upon His humility. It runs through all the twelve principal
mysteries of the Infancy. They one and all breathe the
odour of an inconceivable lowliness.

The exercise of humility is always more or less penitential
to every one. But there was a violence in it to the glory-
circled Soul of Jesus, which beheld God, and was beatified
already, which gave it a peculiar character in our Blessed
Lord. His patience too was almost more wonderful at Beth-
lehem than it was at Calvary. In both He was for ever
holding back those succours with which His Divine Nature
was ready to assist His Humanity ; in both He was refrain-
ing that flood of beatitude which was fain to deluge all the
faculties of His Soul, and to run over through the avenuea

CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME. 393

of His glorified senses. But in Bethlehem He was making
the Infancy bear the burden of His Manhood. His suffer-
ings were as sensible there as on Calvary ; and they were
more unseasonable, more inopportune, more incommodious,
more incongruous at Bethlehem than on Calvary, if we may
dare so to speak, not forgetting how incongruous always any-
thing but glory was to the Incarnate Word, whose sufferings
derive their sole congruity from the immensity of His dear
love.

There is something painful to the tenderness of devotion
in this view of our Saviour's Infant Life. We do not dwell
on it with any predilection. But it is part of the solemn
truth of the Incarnation. It leads us into depths of doctrine,
which cannot be otherwise than fruitful to our souls ; and it
discloses to us some of the inward operations of the Hypos-
tatic Union, which will kindle in us more and more the
spirit of adoration. What a vision for Mary must have
been this interior life of her heavenly Babe ! She saw the
Eternal Word, the boundless joy of angels, the uncreated
splendour of heaven, the brightness of God's perfections,
feeling Himself the cursed of God, the outcast of creation,
with all the odious weight of the world's impurities upon
Him, clothed, disguised, and cumbered with the many-folded
iniquity of its millions of sinners, through all its long
thousands of years. She beheld all this laid on the shrink-
ing purity of His immaculate Soul. She saw the Home of
creatures away from home Himself, and lost, lost in a sea of
sin, and sick, sick as at Gethsemane, sick all His Three-and-
Thirty Years, sick in the days of His dear Childhood, when
through His love all other children are careless, bright, and
gay. She saw the tear-drops form in the eyes of the Eternal,
and she trembled as she saw.

Oh how terrible in its sweetness was the Motherhood of
Mary ! Those tears flowed that we might smile, and have a

394 CALVARY BEFORE ITS TIME.

right to smile, and a cause to smile, and might serve God
with our smiles, and love Him with our smiles, and almost
do penance with our smiles ; for, in all the happiest deeds of
easiest holiness, the Babe of Bethlehem has laid up for us
now a virtue to satisfy the vastness of God's justice. Hence-
forth, after those tears of Bethlehem, if we also weep human
tears, they are either tears of sweet gracious sorrow for sin,
or gladsome tears from excess of love, or tears from the
pleasant pitifulness of pathetic compassion ; and even with
regard to these tears, privileges though they be rather than
penances, the hour will come when the kind hand of Jesus
Himself in His Father's house shall wipe them away
for ever.

\

( 395 )

CHAPTER VIII.

HEAVEN ALREADY.

There are some who have said that joy is a more shallow
thing than sorrow. Surely this is not a just view to take of
God's creation, even since the fall. Truly joy is undermost,
and sorrow is uppermost ; but from this very cause joy is
the deepest of the two. The heart of the spiritual world,
where its central fires are, is deepest joy. The world of
sorrow rests upon it, as on its secure foundation. As under
every stone there is moisture, so under every sorrow there is
joy ; and when we come to understand life rightly, we see
that sorrow is after all but the minister of joy. We dig
into the bosom of sorrow to find the gold and precious stones
of joy. Sorrow is a condition of time, but joy is the con-
dition of eternity. All sorrow lies in exile from God ; all
joy lies in union with Him. In heaven joy will cast out
sorrow, whereas there is not a lot on earth from which
sorrow has been able altogether to banish joy. Joy clings
to us as the creatures of God. It adheres to us wherever we
go. Its fragrance is palpable about us. Its sunshine lights
upon us, and gives us some sort of attractiveness above that
which is our own. Joy hangs about everything which God
has had to do with. There is only one place where there
is no joy, and that dark region is under a special law of its
own, and is darkness because it would not be light. There
is an inevitable joyousness about all that belongs to God.

396 HEAVEN ALREADY.

We are angry with ourselves because we do not sorrow long
enough for our dead. We think it almost a wrong to the
memory of those we loved. But it is the elasticity of life.
Our hearts bound upwards, because God is above. We
cannot help ourselves. The very purling of our blood in our
veins is joyous, because life is a gift direct from God. In
truth joy and sorrow are not contradictories. Sorrow is the
setting of joy, the foil of joy, the shadow which softens joy,
the gloom which makes the light so beautiful, the night
which causes each morning to have the gladness of a resur-
rection. They live together, because they are sisters. Joy
is the eldest-born, and when the younger dies, as she will
die, joy will keep a memory of her about her for evermere,
a memory which will be very gracious, so gracious as to be
part of the bliss of heaven.

There are souls too in the world which have the gift of
finding joy everywhere, and of leaving it behind them when
they go. Joy gushes from under their fingers, like jets of
light. There is something in their very presence, in their
mere silent company, from which joy cannot be extricated
and laid aside. Their influence is an inevitable gladdening
of the heart It seems as if a shadow of God's own gift
had passed upon them. They give light without meaning
to shine ; and coy hearts, like the bashful insects, come forth,
and almost lay aside their sad natures, and weave dances in
the golden beams of these bright natures. Somehow too the
joy all tnrns to God. Without speaking of Him, it preaches
Him. Its odour is as the odour of His presence. It leaves
tranquillity behind, and not unfrequently sweet tears of
prayer. All things grow silently Christian under its reign.
It brightens, ripens, softens, transfigures, like the sunlight,
the most improbable things which come within its sphere.
A single gifted heart like this is the apostle of its neigh-
bourhood. Every one acknowledges its divine right, which

HE A VEN ALREAD T. 397

it never thinks of claiming. There is no need to claim it ;
for none resist its unconquerable gentleness.

Joy is like a missioner who speaks of God ; sorrow is a
preacher who frightens men out of the deadliness of sin into
the arms of their heavenly Father, or who weans them by
the pathos of his reasoning from the dangerous pleasures of
the world. These bright hearts are more like the first than
the second. They have a great work to do for God ; and
they do it often most when they realise it least. It is the
breath they breathe, and the star they were born under, and
the law which encircles them. They have a light within
them, which was not delusive when they were young, and
which age will only make more golden without diminishing
its heat. To live with them is to dwell in a perpetual sun-
set of unboisterous mirth and placid gaiety. Who has not
known such souls ? Who has not owed all that is best in
him, after grace, to such as those? Happy is he who had
such for the atmosphere of his parental home ! Its glory
may have sunk beneath the horizon : but he himself will be
illuminated by its glow until the hour comes for his own
pensive setting. Of a truth he is the happiest, the greatest,
and the most godlike of men, as well as the sole poet among
men, who has added one true joy to the world's stock of
happiness.

There are other souls who for their own good are in want
of joy, whose gift is rather that of an unusual capacity of
joy than a giving of it forth They drink it in as thirsty land
drinks in the rain ; and it is to be remembered we are
speaking, not of pleasure, but of joy. It seems necessary to
them for the healing of their souls, as necessary as sorrow is
for the great multitude of men. Nevertheless these souls,
who are as it were saved by joy, are many more in number
than we should at first sight suppose. Our observations in
the world are continually bringing them to light in the most

398 HE A VEN ALREADY.

unlikely places. They are perpetually taking shelter under
the secret ministrations of the Christian priesthood. Joy
seems to be as needful for them as the sunlight is for plants.
They grow and expand under it, and colour themselves with
the blossoms of various virtues. Neither is their growth
altogether upward, as unkindly judgment, which is always
shallow judgment, commonly supposes. They take deep
root, the deeper root the hotter the sun shines. They seek
the coolness and the moisture which are only deep down.
They are for the most part humble souls, and very steadfast
ones ; and it is rather the excess of their power, than the
vacillation of their weakness, which makes them need so
much of the spirit of gladness. Joy is ballast to them, and
not sails. Their nature is made for swift sailing ; it is joy
that makes them safe sailers. Joy is a perpetual presence
of God to them, and a clear well out of which the spirit of
prayer is lading the cool waters at all hours. It is joy which
gives them their love of mortification. It is joy which
furnishes the exuberant charity of their judgments of others.
Joy softens them, deepens them, elevates them. They can
do all things well when they are joyous, and better when
they are in exceeding joy.

The height of their joy is always the measure of the
depth of their humility. They cannot understand how
it should be otherwise, when they are warned lest it
should delude them or puff them up. They have their
share of sorrows, and bear their part in the world of
sorrow very gracefully. But they have communications
with that deep underworld of joy which lies beneath the
world of sorrow, and by these communications the life of
their souls is set free. They have an unbroken inward
contentment, because they are always successful, as success-
ful as they desira For the spirit of joy enables them to
realise a truth which becomes the anchor of their lives

HEA VEN A LREA DY. 399

that the endeavour is always grander than the work,
because it has a greater capacity of holding the divine.
They are unworldly ; because the greater light within them
extinguishes the lesser light without them. Yet they
are happy in the world with the world's common simple
blameless happiness. For does not earth look more than
ever beautiful, when our ears are stopped with the sounds
of heaven 1 The deaf ear gives all its lost power to the
eye. He who hears only angels' songs, while he looks
on a fair scene of earth, what brighter vision may he
covet on this side the grave? He realises the world too
little to perceive its evil, or he does not dwell on it,
even if he perceives it, much less does he become
entangled in its defilement. It is but a show to him;
and he needs but a show to make him happy ; for those
sounds in his ears are causing beatitude in his heart.
The windmills in the green landscape go round as silently
and almost as gracefully, as the distant woods wave in
the wind ; but, when we come near, they creek and
clatter, like the grating tongues of wicked men. But
the gay pageants of earth's landscapes are always silent
windmills to the happy man. He does not go near enough
to hear them, and if he did, there are other voices in
his ear, and he would hardly hear the outward noise.
Joy too can try the soul no less than sorrow, and it
has mystical implements of its own wherewith to do the
work. It has fears also of its own, like its sister sorrow ;
and it is a gift of the Holy Ghost, which she is not.
She is but the dower of a judicious providence. Finally,
joy has its own saints to be examples to its own souls;
and they are of all saints those, the shining of whose
light the world is least able to comprehend.

Beauty is akin to joy, and the beauty of heavenly
things has the same effect of making us unworldly. Much

400 HEAVEN ALREADY.

of worldliness consists in a mental and moral atmosphere ;
and the beauty of divine things, bringing with them their
own special joy, surrounds us with a supernatural atmos-
phere, which assimilates our inward life to itself after a
tima We shall find that this will be the result of our
reflections upon the joys of the Sacred Infancy. If it
prophecies of earthly years by its shadows of Calvary, it
prophecies also of the eternal years by the Heaven which
it has already in its heart. As Calvary is the ground-
melody of Bethlehem, so is Heaven the deeper ground-
melody of both.

But where is there room for joy in an Infancy so
preternaturally peopled with sorrows and perpetually
eclipsed with a startling gloom, as we have seen it to
be in the last Chapter 1 If there is a realm of joy to be
opened out before us equal in extent to that other one
of woe, how can it be that the one will not neutralise the
other, and that both will not seem to us but fictitious
unrealities of the schools? Our faith will teach us that
so it was, even though it may not make clear to us the
method of this supernatural harmony. We do not doubt
our Lord's agony in the garden to have been mental
torture of the most exquisite description. Yet we as
little doubt that at that very time He enjoyed the
beautifying Vision of the Most Holy Trinity. We can-
not understand the operations of Two Natures in One
Person : we cannot understand the operations of a Human
Nature with a Divine Person; so neither can we under-
stand the twofold life of Yiater and Comprehensor, which
our faith teaches us that the Soul of Christ lived on
earth. So neither can we allow ourselves to speak as
as if the Two Natures were but two voices or two
musical instruments, and that the Person of the Word
now sounded upon one, and now upon another, in alte^

HEAVEN ALREADY, 401

nation or snccession. As the operations of the Divine
Kature were incessant, so also ivere the operations of the
Sacred Humanity incessant also ; while the perfect science
of the Human Soul rendered His whole inward life simul-
taneous and unsuccessive, so that He did not merely
change from joy to sorrow, and from sorrow back to joy.
It is true then, that within the limits of the Sacred
Infancy there is a world of joy as vast, complete, and
wonderful, as the world of sorrow which we have seen
already to be there. They were two lives, and yet but
one life. They went on together uncommingling, yet
at the same time neither independent nor apart No
boundary can be drawn between the two, any more than
we can trace a boundary between the waters of the river
and the waters of the lake even while as yet they are uncon-
fused. The lower phenomena of the impressionable part
of His human nature were so far overruled and constrained,
as that His beatitude should not deaden the anguish of His
Agony, or His foresight of the Passion embitter His joy in
the love of His immaculate Mother.

The world of sorrow then, with all its consequences,
was as real and substantial as if it was His only world,
as if it were the length and breadth of all His life. The
world of joy also, with all its consequences, was no less
of a reality, and covered His whole life with as remark-
able a universality of glory as His sorrow did. Only,
because of the circumstances of the Incarnation, and the
prominence of our Lord's redeeming work, the world of
joy is least known to us, because it is undermost. It
had no such outward revelation of itself on earth, as
Calvary was an outward revelation of the inward sorrow.
His life in heaven now is the out-blossoming of His
secret beatitude on earth. Neither does His joy appeal
to our sympathies so directly or so touchingly as His

2 Q

402 HEA YEN A LREA D Y.

sorrow. We are selfish even in our purest love of ouf
Blessed Lord. We cannot do without His Calvary. We
are drawn to His Cross, because by His Cross He has
drawn us to Himself. What have we to do with His
brightness yet, who are trembling applicants for His
Precious Blood? Moreover His joy was His own; and,
although we were not altogether without our place in it,
as in what that belongs to Him has not His love given
us a place ? nevertheless we have not to do with it as we
have to do with His sorrows, who have caused them by
our sins. By virtue of the Hypostatic Union there was an
adorable vastness in our Lord's Soul which enabled these
two worlds of joy and grief to coexist, and to be coeval
fountains of innumerable tender mysteries.

To Saint Joseph the Sacred Infancy was his cross.
Bethlehem was to him instead of Calvary. The earthly
troubles and inconveniences, which the Incarnation brought
along with it, fell in great measure upon him as his peculiar
burden. It came too when he was comparatively old. The
end for which he lived he did not arrive at until he was
mature in years. The treasures of God were committed to
his sole keeping. Doubts and fears, anxiety and haste,
public notice and difficult responsibility, are trials which
press heavily on those whose first manhood is passed, and
more heavily than common on a tender and afi'ectionate
heart like that of Joseph. We cannot avoid picturing him
to ourselves as one who was rather fitted for contemplation
than for action, both on account of his exceeding tender-
ness, and also of his remarkable quietness of spirit ; yet
out of the bashful timidity of a contemplative he had to
draw the bravery of an apostle. For well nigh thirteen
years the Incarnation hardly allowed him one day of peace ;
and then when something of an anxious peace came to
him at Nazareth, the fires of divine love from the vicinity

HEA VEN ALREADY. 403

of Jesus silently fretted his life away. We feel that his
whole early life was but a preparation for the unworldly
office he was at last to assume.

Most saints have one eminent cross, which towers above
their other crosses, and gives the character as well to their
sanctity as to their lives. AVho can doubt but that
Bethlehem was Joseph's cross? Yet was it also a land
of pleasantness, a very world of joy, even to him. He
would hardly have exchanged Bethlehem for heaven, just
as we know Simeon had prayed for his rest and release
to wait, until he had seen the Lord's Christ on earth.
It was dear to him, not only because it was a cross and
he a saint, and the saints are ever enamoured of their
crosses, but because it was a marvellous and abounding
joy. The mysteries which chequered the twelve years
were fountains to him of holy gladness and of divine love.
The sight of Jesus was an endless vision, not only soothing
the soul, but filling it to overflowing with spiritual sweet-
ness. The light in His eyes, the tones of His voice, the
play of His fingers. His attitudes in His various occupations,
were all an overwhelming delight to Joseph's soul. His
spiritual discernment, and his union with God, enabled
him to penetrate deeply into all these things.

If the unborn Baptist leaped for joy when he heard
the sound of Mary's voice, what must the company of
the sinless Mother have been to Joseph, to whom next to
Jesus she most belonged 1 His conjugal love was actually
part of his religion.* His tender ministries to her were
a worship which sanctified him and raised him near to
God. Mary is the copious fountain of joy to the whole
earth ; and it was Joseph who dwelt nearest to the foun-

* Rafifaello Maria, the Carmelite, has a beautiful thought in bis Life of
St. Joseph. Speaking of St. Joseph's marriage with our Blessed Lady,
he says, "The Holy Ghost, who resided in both of them, was theii
conjugal love." — Vita di S. Giuseppe, p. 48.

404 HBA VEN A LREA D Y.

tain where it sprang all fresh and abundant from the rock.
What a joy must she not have been to him ! His office
towards the Incarnate Word was one which he could
hardly ever exercise without trembling. But surely it
was as the Thrones are said to tremble in heaven, with
an excess of reverence which is also an excess of bliss. If
exaltation humbles the saints, and if humility is of all graces
the grace most prolific of interior joy, how great must have
been the humility of Joseph, how transcending the rapture of
his joy ! Love wore him out, and so he died. But w^e may
well believe it was through the concussions of joy within his
soul that love came to slay him. At Nazareth his outward
cares were fewer. His attention was more exclusively con-
centrated on Jesus. Jesus also, as He grew up, and took
His share in the toils of the poor household, in some sense
passed more from the jurisdiction of Mary to that of Joseph.
Thus Joseph's commanding of Jesus, teaching Him, coming
in contact with Him, were more frequent and more direct ;
and if, as we believe, each order that he gave Him shook
his own soul to its centre with thrills of trembling rapture,
we can understand how the aged saint, in the beautiful
furnace of those last burning years, would become the
helpless prey of love. Moreover, the shadow of the Eternal
Father, as it settled down upon him, could not do other-
wise than bring with it a joy too full of profound reverence
to be agitation, but one which would have laid too great
a weight of bliss upon a soul that was not expressly chosen
to bear such an incomparable burden. He was drawn
within the ring of those unutterable shadows which the
Holy Trinity is pleased to cast around itself; and if
Abraham's bosom was sweet rest, full of visionary beati-
tude, where the old patriarchs awaited the opening of
heaven by the Risen Jesus, what must the bosom of that
awful divine cloud have been, in which the soul of Joseph

I

HEAVEN ALREADY. 405

was involved ? Even to our hearts, devotion to the Holy
Trinity is one of simple exultation, because it is also one
of the purest adoration. What must have been the jubi-
lee of Joseph's Spirit 1 That it was the shadow of the
First Person which was on him, unspeakably intensified
his joy. To him was communicated the likeness of the
incommunicable Father, of whom even apostles said, Show
us the Father, and it is enough for us. He was like a
sort of visible mission of the Unsent Father, to whose
Person mission does not belong ; only His peculiar presence
goes along with the mission of the Other Two. Thus
also by his similitude to the Father did he enjoy a
mysterious similitude to the Son, and by his office towards
Mary he wore also the likeness of the Holy Ghost, the
uncreated jubilee of the Godhead. Who is sufficient to
analyse the heavenly joy, which was blended in the waters
of fountains such as these? Who can name its kind, or
test its virtues, or put into figures its proportions and its
quantities 1 Yet this shadow of the Eternal Father was cast
on Joseph by the Sacred Infancy. Was it not then to him
a land of pleasantness, and in its own way, also, a land of
peace, even though it fell to his lot as a heritage of suffering 1
The same is still more true of Mary. Her double
simultaneous life of sorrow and of joy is one of the most
striking similitudes between her Immaculate Heart and
the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She was the queen of joys,
as well as the mother of dolours. Her sorrows during
the Sacred Infancy were little less than a transcript of
His, proportioned to the measure of her souL The words
of Simeon had lodged Calvary in her heart almost in its
fulness. But, independently of this, the greater number
of the mysteries of the Sacred Infancy were mysteries of
sorrow to her. The joy of the Nativity was dashed by
much that was bitter, not for her own sake, but for the

4o6 HEA VEN A LREADY.

adoring love she bore her Son. The Presentation was a
joyous mystery, and yet it was the first of the seven dolours
which the Church selects for our especial commemoration.
All bright things had their dark side with her. As it was
the self-imposed law of His heart, so was it the love-imposed
law of hers. The Flight into Egypt was a sorrow that
would have been wild, had wildness comported with the
perfections of her queenly soul. Her sojourn there was a
sorrow also ; and her return was fruitful in hitherto inexperi-
enced vicissitudes of sufiering. The turning away from Jeru-
salem brought with it fresh grief ; and the Infancy ended
with that terrible trial, His dereliction of her for three days.
Surely never did land more truly bring forth sorrows a
hundredfold, than did the Sacred Infancy to Mary.

Yet what were all the joys of all the saints to hersi
Her very sorrows were so full of joy that she would not
have exchanged them for the most ravishing sweetness that
ever fettered a holy soul in a perfect captivity of delights.
If we except the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was ever any
fountain of joy opened in creation to compare with her
Maternity? The splendour of its purity, the depth of its
affections, the heavenliness of its mystery, the loveliness of
its exaltation, the magnificence of its prerogatives, the
divine beauty of its object, the ineffable raptures of its
experience, what has there ever been in God's wide world
to compare with the wonderful realities of the Virgin-
Mother's bliss, realities which we are so far from compre-
hending, that the greater part of them we are unable even
to conjecture or suspect 1 There are differences in degree so
great as almost to constitute a difference in kind, in conse-
quence of their rising into other atmospheres. So the multi-
plication of all the ardent love of all human mothers will not
figure for us Mary's maternal love of Jesus : and what is love,
even while it is weeping, but the intensest of earthly joys 1

HEAVEN ALREADY. 407

Indeed it would be no extravagance to say, that all the
joys of the angelic world could make no joy that should
compare, either for quantity or quality, with the single joy
of Mary's Motherhood. She had many joys besides that;
although, whether we look forward to her Assumption or
backward to her Immaculate Conception, the Maternity was
the fountain of them all. But, considering exclusively the
direct joy of her Maternity, it overtops and outshines the
entire joy of the angelical creation. From the day of the
Nativity this joy was always at its height in her soul. We
have no reason to believe that it ever was suspended. We
cannot so think of our Blessed Lady's soul as to suppose
that even her dolours overwhelmed it, or that her pain
ever concentrated exclusively upon itself, as on one point,
the capacious, far-reaching faculties of her highly-gifted and
Christlike mind. Doubtless such a thing may be said ; but
the more we think of her marvellous inward life, the less
can we bring ourselves to say such things. At any rate,
during the Sacred Infancy, with the Babe upon her lap,
touching Him, seeing Him, hearing Him, feeding, clothing,
washing, nursing Him, with all the varieties of a Mother's
fondling gracefully blending with the creature's delighted
adoration and the ever new bliss of a fresh astonishment,
the joy of her Maternity must have reigned, if ever, over
her magnificent soul. Indeed her joy is one of her wonders,
to the contemplation of which the Church calls us by the
devotion which she authorises and suggests.

She chooses seven joys in particular out of our Mother's
life, which we are to contemplate. Of these seven five are
confined to the period of the Sacred Infancy, while the
Resurrection is as it were the joyous finding in the temple
renewed a second time, the restoration of that Babe of
Bethlehem, who, when He was taken down from the Cross,
assumed again His old childish resting-place upon Hia

4o8 HE A VEN A LREAD\.

Mother's lap ; and the Ascension was the exaltation of that
Flesh and Blood to which such honour was no less due in
the crib of Bethlehem than it was that bright afternoon
on Olivet. The Ascension was but the publication of
tJie sweet secret of the Infancy. He, who studiously and
intently meditates on Mary's seven joys, will soon perceive
lihat, among all the glories of creation, the joy of that sinless
being is among the greatest, catching inner lights from
heaven and wonderfully reflecting them in its calm pro-
fundities, shifting from diversity to diversity of splendour,
each change of which makes eye-music to him who gazes
thereon in reverential love, unfolding for us jealous folds in
the character of God, and disclosing Him to us in the
grandeur of His exceptional ways and engaged upon His
unusual works. At times too the mists part in the bright
landscape of her joys, and we seem to see, as through cloud-
windows, or glowing fissures in a sunset, into the marvel
creation would have been had it never fallen, and indeed
actually was when it came fresh and virginal from the
Creator's hand. But it is especially in the mysteries of
the Infancy, that these gleams are most vivid and most
frequent. In her, therefore, throughout our Lord's Child-
hood there was a heaven of light as well as an earth of
darkness. She, too, like Him walked the world in the
darkness of her exile. She too, imperfectly like Him, had
nearly attained her heavenly home, though she had not,
like Him, perfectly attained it. With her, as with Him, it
was the very splendour of her heaven of light, which made
the darkness of her earth so pathetically dark.

But the grand creation of joy is in the Sacred Heart of
Jesus. Never has the blessedness of God been poured
forth outside Himself with such overwhelming splendour or
with such unstinted munificence, as over the created nature
which He vouchsafed to assume to Himself. At all

HEAVEN ALREADY. 409

moments, even during the dereliction upon the Cross, and
without impeding the vehemence of His affliction, Jesus
was almost infinitely blessed. But, if there was a time
during His sojourn upon earth, which was more eminently
than another a period of joy, it was during what are called
the joyful mysteries of His Childhood. The usage of the
faithful, which is mostly very accurate theology, assigns
joy to the Infancy as instinctively as it attributes sorrow to
the Passion, and glory to the forty days which followed the
Kesurrection. It is true that the perfection of our Lord's
science give an extraordinary equability to His life, by
enabling Him to live as it were different lives simultane-
ously. But, at least for our devotion, if we may not look
for joy during His Childhood, where may we look for it
at all? Moreover the object of our present enquiry is not
so much, or at least not so directly, the whole joy of Jesus,
as the special joys of His Infancy. But we must consider
first of all the joy of the Eternal Word, the joy of that
Divine Person who had assumed this Human Nature, and
to whom this Human Heart belonged, which was a cabinet
of gladness enough to beatify a thousand heavens.

If we might say of one attribute rather than another,
that in it resides the life of God, we should say that it was
in His beatitude. It is in His understanding, because His
understanding is the utmost bliss. It is in His uncreated
sanctity ; for His holiness beatifies Him, It is in His self-
sufficiency; because His self-sufficiency is the realisation
of His bliss. He is a simple act, and we cannot otherwise
qualify the act or characterise it than as bliss. The eternal
life of glorified spirits and souls, which He pours into them,
is an outpouring of His bliss. To see Him as He is, is
simply bliss. Beatitude is joy, divine joy. If it is
allowable to use such words, joy is the vital thing in God.
He must be God, because He is eternally and self-sufficiently

4IO HEAVEN ALREADY.

blessed. He must be eternally and self-sufficiently blessed,
precisely because He is God. God is not filled with
life, as He fills created vases with angelic, human, or
other life. He is Himself life, absolute life, a living act.
But in our necessarily indistinct conceptions of Him, joy is
to His being what life is to ours, only that His being and
His joy are not only inseparable, but identical, and there-
fore cannot stand in any relation to each other, as our being
and our joy stand to one another. God is what He is, and
we cannot change Him by any views of ours. But much
depends for ourselves upon the view we take of God.
Some one view of Him is always to each mind the truest
view; and those, whose ideas of God become simplified
and luminous by looking at His majesty from the point of
view of His beatitude, will find that it will materially in-
fluence their choice of opinions in theology, and bring forth
many fruitful consequences in their practical devotion.

To my eyes, I confess, that the longer I am allowed by
His forbearance to look at God, the more one twofold view
of Him fills my soul with a love which is always maturing
itself in fear, and an astonishment which never wears off,
and overawes while it attracts; — outside Himself, and to-
wards us. His simplicity appears to resolve itself into a
love, which is intensified by His justice, while inside Him-
self, and independent of us, it seems to resolve itself into
a beatitude, whose placidity is deepened by a creative
yearning to communicate His bliss. It is as if His love
were dissatisfied with His inward contentment, and broke
forth, and ran beyond Him, while His beatitude brooded
over the abysses of its own eternity, and islanded His
unapproachable purity from the contact of created things.
Such is the semblance with which the mind disguises God,
as if His life were thus mystically a taking in of breath and
a breathing it forth like ours. He has much to pardon in

HEAVEN ALREADY. 411

our worthiest conceptions of His majesty ; and to holy fear
all that it requires will be condoned.

It is only with feelings of speechless adoration that we
can venture to look on the Person of the Unbegotten
Father with His infinite fecundity. There is something
awful in the joy which He has in Himself. His com-
placency in His illimitable perfections has not the shape
and fashion of any created thing, however magnificent or
marvellous. He knows Himself. He comprehends His
own immensity. He fathoms the depths of His beauty.
His life is beatitude. It cannot be otherwise than an
infinity of glorious bliss. But His joy is not the effect of
His exploring His own Being by His self-knowledge. All
things begin equally in Him in whom is no beginning, or
shadow of beginning, at all. His joy is His fecundity, and
His fecundity His joy. His knowledge of Himself, a
knowledge which cannot but unspeakably beatify Him,
though not as cause, is the production of another coequal
Person. His simple beholding of Himself is not a process ;
it is substantial and vital, a living consubstantial Person.
He gazes upon Himself in gladness, and He beholds the
Word, whom that self-knowledge has produced ; and in the
perfect similitude of the Word He beholds Himself. The
Word is the Father's joy in Himself, because He is His
knowledge of Himself, and His knowledge is unbeginning,
uncreated joy. The Word Himself, thus eternally pro-
duced, is an infinity of joy in Himself also, co-equal in
vastness, in magnificence, in eternity, with the joy of the
Father. Thus the Generation of the Word is the illimitable
joy of the Divine Understanding.

The meeting, we are speaking human words which are
necessarily false, of these two Oceans of bliss, the Father
and the Son, causes as it were a double infinity of joy which
is as unimaginable as it is indescribable. But so fruitful is

412 HE A VEN ALREADY.

this joy, so joyous the fruitfulness, that it is absolutely
necessitated to produce a third infinity of joy, the Person of
the Holy Ghost. So universally is this Divine Person, who
is produced by the love of the Father and Son, as by one
principle, — so universally is He referred to joy, that the
ancient Fathers named Him the Jubilee of the Father and
the Son, an uncreated Jubilee, the never beginning and the
always-beginning self-exultation of the Godhead. As the
Son is light, the Spirit is fire. As the Son is wisdom, the
Spirit is love ; while the Father is eminently self-sufficiency
and power. Thus the necessary inward emanations of the
Godhead seem to simplify themselves in joy the further
they advance, and their Term, who can never be overpassed,
is named of the Christian Church the everlasting eternally-
proceeding Jubilee. Thus the Procession of the Holy Ghost
is the illimitable joy of the Divine Will.

Thus contemplating the joy of the Father and the joy of
the Holy Ghost, we may now gaze upon the joy of the
Word, which is as it were contained between those other
Two Divine Persons. We are looking on an ocean, as it
were from above, from a cloud in the air, an impossible
station which we may imagine. It is an ocean which has
no shores, and yet millions of beings lie external to it. It
is as unfathomable as it is vast, yet it was all contained
in the littleness of the Babe of Bethlehem. Nevertheless
through the indistinctness of this mighty ocean, we seem as
we gaze to distinguish eight oceans in the bosom of the one,
as the one itself is but one of three. There is, first of all,
the joy of the Son in having such a Father. The delight,
which is His life, is a perfect knowledge of the inexhaustible
grandeurs of the Father. His Father's excellence is so
infinite that it fills His own infinity. But that such an
excellence should stand to Him in the relation of Father is
a joy so unspeakable, a contentment so peculiar, a glory so

HEA VEN ALREADY. 413

singular and so unshared, that we cannot compass it with
the extremest subtlety of thought.

Yet the second joy, that He Himself is such a Son,
is a joy as vast and as unspeakable as the other. The
perfection of His likeness to the Father stirs His joy like
a tide, and stirs it even to its lowest depths. It is as great
a bliss to Him, and yet a distinct bliss to be Himself the
Son as it is to Him to have the Father for His Father. His
simple filiation, apart, if we can think of it apart, from
the excellences which it combines, is in itself an abyss of
uncreated exultation. He broods over it with everlasting
complacency. It is a filiation always actual, for He is being
eternally begotten every moment, and therefore it is a beati-
tude always fresh and always new, like morning on the sea.

The third ocean gleams dazzlingly under the mist which
always lies unuplifted over the secret things of God.
He and the Father are one ; and from Them, as from
a single fountain, proceeds the Co-equal Spirit in a
silent motionless Procession of uncreated splendour, an
adorable fiery Jubilee, completing, binding, limiting the
Godhead, and exhausting the mysterious necessities of
the Divine Nature. It is God Himself, building Himself
up like a fortress of fire between Himself and all possible
things besides, the ever-burning, eternal Watchtower over-
looking all creation's realms, a Limit to creation, as well
as a Limit to the Godhead, a Limit to creation which can
itself have no created limit, but to which the Third Person
of the Holy Trinity is the Limit in sight of which the
farthest ascending creatures come, and yet come not up to
it, like the far-seen palisades of mountains that bound some
earthly view, the feet of which the misty outstretched plains
do not appear to reach, or touch. The joy of the Son in
His fecundity, His bliss in producing with the Father a
Spirit so adorably co-equal with Himself and with Them

414 HEA VEN ALREADY.

both, is His third joy, a glory which is a mere assemblage
of definitions when we describe our faith, but which, like
all definitions, is a glorious transfiguration of sanctity within
our hearts. There is a power of holiness in true theology,
which they who slight it will one day uselessly regret..

There is a fourth joy of the Son in the might and sweet-
ness of that mutual love of the Father and Himself, which
mingling in one fountain, had the power from its com-
mingling to produce the Holy Ghost. The method, if we
may so speak, by which the Holy Ghost was produced,
is to the Son a joy as infinite, as the fact of His production.
Under what similitude shall we speak of that mutual love
of the Father and the Son, and of its unutterable operation 1
We might perchance find some figure in the beautiful
magnificence of fire, only that its loveliness is too terrible
both to eye and ear to let our frightened nature be at
peace in the presence of its power ; and its power becomes
beautiful in proportion as it is beyond control. That love
is two fountains, and yet they were never two. They
unite, yet they never were disunited. They produce, yet
they never were without Him whom they produce. He
is not a consequence of the love which produces Him but
coequal with it, coeternal with it, consubstantial with it.
There are mysteries which even heaven will not make plain.
They will be among the most peculiar of the joys of heaven.
Such perhaps will be the method by which the Holy Ghost
proceeds from, yet is not generated by, the mutual love of
the Father and the Son. The Word is the wisdom of the
Godhead. The possession of secrets is one of wisdom's jo}t^
a different joy from that of its communicating them. The
incommunicable knowledge of the manner of the Holy
Ghost's Procession is perhaps one of the glad secrets of the
Word. It is a divine jubilee to Him that none can com-
prehend the outflow of His Uncreated Jubilee.

HE A VEN ALREADY. 415

His fifth joy lies before our imagination as something so
surpassingly beautiful, that we long to have words to express
even what our poor inadequate thoughts are able to think.
It arises from another twofold love, like the twofold love of
the Father and Himself, by which the Holy Spirit was pro-
duced. It is the love of the Holy Ghost and Himself, His
blissful love of the Spirit and the Spirit's blissful love of
Him. In His love of the Holy Spirit there is that peculiar
blessedness, which forms an element in the joy of the
Father's love of Him, as of the Person He has produced, and
which the Son could not have felt were He not with the
Father the producer of the Holy Ghost. His joy would have
wanted this particular eminence, if the Holy Spirit had pro-
ceeded from the Father alone. In the same manner also
that other element in tlie Father's joy, which arises from the
love of the Person whom He has produced and is producing,
enters into the Son's inheritance of joy, as He receives the
same kind of love from the Holy Ghost who is proceeding
from Him, which He Himself renders to the Father by whom
He is being begotten. Here is a joy, the very double of that joy
which produced a Third Person in the Holy Trinity ; yet there
is no more production ; the bliss falls back and scatters itself
in showers of uncreated light over the Three Blessed Persons,
Who is able even to dream worthily of such things as these 1

A sixth ocean of joy now succeeds, though its succession
is but an appearance and a show to the infirmity of our
unsteady sight. It is the joy of the Word in the coequality
of the Three Persons. The Godhead is now complete, as it
always was. The Procession of the Holy Ghost is the per-
fection of that ever-living Life, It is a joy to the Son that
He is coequal with the Father, and an equal joy to Him that
the Holy Ghost is coequal with Himself. It is a further joy
to Him that this sovereign coequality remains undisturbed
by the seeming inferiority of Generation and Procession. It

4 1 6 HBA VEN ALREADY.

is a rapture even to the quietude of the Divine Nature, that
the Limit placed to Itself by the mutual love of the Father
and the Son should be in the most absolute manner coequal
with the awful unbegotten Fountain of Godhead, from whom
the Son Himself proceeded and proceeds.

But there is a seventh joy which transcends even this joy.
Coequality does not adequately express the perfection of the
blessedness of God. Though doubtless every distinction in
the Holy Trinity is infinitely beatific, nevertheless the
majesty of uncreated bliss reposes in its unity rather than in
its distinctions. The Unity of the Godhead would seem to
be its crowning joy. The Three Persons are not only coequal
Persons, but they are one God ; and it is only in this Unity
that Their mutual love is majestically consummated. God's
delight in His own Oneness is inexplicable ; but we feel
sure it is the mountain-top of all that mountainous world of
glories, sublimities, and joys; and, by the miracle of His
Nature, not to be depicted by art or fancy of man, while it is
the top, and because it is the top, of all that infinite mountain-
range, it is the outspread base, and the magnific root as well.
We might dare to think, that, as by some special appropria-
tion the Son is the wisdom of the Godhead, so there was to
Him, in the same sense that injures not the equal eminence of
the Other Two, some special delight in the Unity of the
Godhead which His wisdom would so specially appreciate.

Who would have believed that another, an eighth ocean,
could have opened to our view 1 The joy of the Son as it
were comes down from the lone heights of the Divine Unity,
and broods with scintillations of quivering peaceful splendour
over the eminence of His own Person. He joys in His own
unity as Son. He exults that He is the only Son of the
Father, and that there can be no other, though to satisfy the
Father and Himself He will, in special alliance with the
Holy Ghost, multiply His own titles of filiation by

HEA VBN ALREADY, 417

becoming incarnate, to show how infinitely dear to Him that
mystery of filiation could be. He too had His unity, and
His joy of unity. He was the only Son. He rejoiced also
that He was the Eternal Son, that the Father had been for
ever a Father, and only by Him could be a Father. He
rejoiced that the Father never had been without Him ; for
the Father's sake He rejoiced as well as for His own. He
rejoiced that His own Generation had never begun, and
equally He rejoiced that it was always going on, and would
never end ; for His Father's sake He rejoiced in this also, as
well as for His own. He rejoiced that He was the Eternal
Son, because thus He entered into the breathing forth of
the Holy Ghost. By His eternal Generation it was that
He took, and for ever takes, part in the eternal Procession
of the Spirit. In this also He rejoiced, as well for the
Spirit's sake as for His own. He rejoiced that the Holy
Ghost should have the jubilee of proceeding from a Person
like His, with a joy which equalled that other joy of being
Himself one of the Persons from whom the Holy Ghost
proceeded. In this too He rejoiced, as well for the Spirit's
sake as for His own. It was by the eternity of His Sonship
that all this joy was gained.

Furthermore, He rejoiced that He was the necessary Son
of the Father. He rejoiced that He was no free emanation
of God, like the beautiful created worlds, but that the
Father could not do without Him, nor without Him could
the Holy Spirit be the jubilee He is. His Sonship was the
first sweet necessity of the Godhead, which yet could have
no first because it could have no beginning. He rejoiced
that the majestic freedom of the Godhead, to the full size of
which freedom its mighty gladness swells, should reside in
its necessities, and that His Sonship should be the necessity
of the Father, who could not but beget Him, and the
necessity of the Holy Ghost, who could not but proceed

4i8 HEAVEN ALREADY,

from Him together with the Father, and His own necessity,
who could not but be everlastingly and jubilantly begotten.
Thus His eighth joy was a triple joy, one joy made of three,
a threefold unity of joy which simply concerned His own
Person, as being the only, the eternal, and the necessary Son
of God. These were His joys, ages back and from the be-
ginning. But we need not speak of them in the past tense
only. They are His life, not His history. These are His joys
at this moment of the dawning of a summer day; they will be
His joys for ever. How beautiful is Thy life, Eternal Word !
Such are the joys of the Three Divine Persons, and in
particular the eight beatitudes of the Person of the Son.
But, as all within God is joy, all His outpourings are joy
also. If sorrow is the child of the fall, as was said before,
joy was the intended state of the unfallen world. Because
God is God, creation must needs swim in joy, as if joy were
air and space to it. This was the primary intention. This
is the inextinguishable brightness in the idea of creation.
Even now how joyous it all is, with gladness almost divinely
rebelling against its penal destiny of grief. Earth is like a
minstrel beside herself, making songs of her sorrows, and
setting even her lamentations to inspiring music. Sin
brings the reverse of joy, because it is the contradictory of
God. It puts out the light of the world, so far as it can
put it out, because it obscures or falsifies the intent of
creative love. Redemption is to bring back joy, and tc
recover creation's lost birthright for it ; for what is the end
of creation, but to enter into the joy of its Lord 1 Redemp-
tion is thus a second outflow of joy, as creation was a first.
Grace itself is a sovereign joy, even in what is painful and
harsh to nature, as the blythe austerities of the saints assure
us, and the raptures of martyrdom authentically testify.
But the Divine Person who has redeemed us is the Word, that
Person whose own joys we have ventured to contemplate in

HEAVEN ALREADY. 419

Buch detail, that Person who has sheathed His infinite grandeur
in the littleness of that infantine frame at Bethlehem.

Thus our joy stands in a peculiar relation to the joy of
the Eternal Word. All the joys we have are in a very real
sense from the Eternal Word, who has redeemed us by
His Incarnation, and did thereby even merit grace for the
angels, who needed not redeeming grace. From the joy
therefore of the highest seraphim to the blythe play of the
Christian child on the village green, all joy is from Him.
Nay, because of the Word's peculiar connection with
creation, we may reverently say that the joys in the bright
eyes and inarticulate thanksgivings of animals are from
Him. He is joy, because He is light. This is very
noticeable. He is the light of creatures, because He is the
brightness of the Father; and where there is light, there
is joy. Light is the peculiar outpouring of the Second
Person, outpoured over every man that comes into the world,
the outpouring of the Person of the Word. It seems to
come from His personality and from what constitutes it,
which lets in the light, and so the joy, of the Godhead
upon us. His Sacred Humanity lies in the very focus and
fountain of this light, or rather call it light-joy, and, catch-
ing and making visible the splendour, as bright objects
catch and diffuse the light, it illuminates all the heaven
both of angels and of men. Thus the joy of the Word is
eternal, illimitable, all-seeing, almighty, all-holy, and quite
incredibly communicative; and, if communicative in such
an excessive degree to all creatures, what must it have
been, what must it be, to His Sacred Humanity? Joy is
an inevitableness of God, if we may so express ourselves in
every one of His operations. There is a joy to the rest of
His admiring creation even in the most appalling exhibitions
of His justice ; and, while we are still in the light of earth
and the faith of Christ, it seems as if He could not touch us,

420 HE A VEN A LREA DY.

but joy comes. Even in chastisements it is a deep joy, and
the most availing consolation, that the infliction is from Him.
Joy is in some sense our final idea of God ; for it is the con-
ception of Him which we are to realise to ourselves in Heaven
What we have now to contemplate is the joy of the
Eternal Word as it was and is communicated to His Sacred
Humanity, and especially as it was communicated to it in
the Infancy. Sprinklings of the fountain rained even on
Mary and Joseph. Shadows from those heights fell also
on them, and beautified them where they fell. St. Joseph's
awe-stricken joy in being the shadow of the Father was a
communication to him, in its measure, of the joy of the
Word in being the express similitude of His Eternal Father ;
while Joseph's love of Jesus, having in it none of the
natural love of an earthly father, was a shadow of the bliss-
ful love of the Father for His Eternal Son. Moreover,
his office of special minister and steward of the Sacred
Humanity privileged him to participate in his degree in
the joyous love which the Holy Ghost bore to that dear
Humanity. Mary's joy in Jesus was a still deeper and
more substantial shadow of the complacency of the Father
in Him, because of the reality of her maternal office ; and,
loving the Father as the Father of her Son, and her Son
more as the Son of the Father than as her own, there was
a blessedness in her love resembling the jubilee of the
Holy Ghost in the Divine Persons from whom He is
eternally proceeding. Meanwhile if it ever might be said
that deep joyous love identified a mother and her child,
what identity of love was there not between Mary and the
Eternal Son. The authority of Catholic writers has
allowed us to call the Holy Family the Earthly Trinity;
and thus, like the soft-footed shadows of the cedars moving
in slow silence with the sun over the sequestered lawn, the
flake-like shadows of divine things drop, as noiselessly as

HEAVEN ALREADY. 421

night-fall, over the Holy Family, making the Earthly Trinity
a transcript of the Three-fold Majesty in heaven.

We have seen the joys of the Eternal "Word in the Bosom
of the Father ; let us look at them now on the lap of Mary.
The first joy of His Sacred Humanity was in His adoration
of God. The highest happiness of the creature is in his
adoration of the Creator, with the closest adoration of which
a created spirit is capable. Now the sight of God produces
in the soul the highest adoration of which it is capable.
Hence whether we look at a created spirit as passively
receiving into itself through the light of glory the Beatific
Vision of the Most High, or as it were rising up aided by
that same light of glory, to meet the magnificence of the
Vision by its own acts, we shall find that adoration expresses
more nearly than any other word the glory and the bliss of
its union with God. If the sight of God did not awaken
within the spirit the music and the splendour of devotion, it
would be but like the sun pouring the gorgeousness of its
unfertile radiance on the naked crags of some dreary moun-
tain. But such a supposition is impossible. The Vision
carries with it into the creature a very world of light, and
joy, and love, and glory, which form an ecstasy of rapturous
adoration. Sin so impedes our love on earth, and our love
of God is 80 ungenerous, and our attainments in holiness so
mean, that we do little but accumulate words when we speak
of the processes of beatitude in heaven. Yet surely our own
poor experience on earth must have already taught us that
there is no pleasure, in life's best experience, equal to that
pacific tumult of delight which has many times stirred within
our souls when we have been worshipping God.

Our very senses seem to partake of the general gladness
of our nature. Nothing is wanting. The rough is smoothed,
the empty is filled up. A contentment, which is mighty
although it is calm, insinuates itself everywhere, and even

422 HE A VEN ALREADY.

finds depths in our souls which we ourselves hardly sus-
pected, and takes possession of them with a fulness which
appears to double our life for the moment both in breadth
and depth. "We are so completely made for God, that we
are not fully ourselves except when we are united with Him.
The joy of that union, and it seems to be precisely the joy
of it, makes our nature sensibly one. Nothing but adoration
will fill a created spirit to the brim with joy. The lives of
the saints illustrate this truth to us in ways which are almost
beyond our comprehension. What then must it be in Jesus 1
If His adoration was, in a sense, equal to God Himself, what
must His joy have been ? How far off were all the ecstasies
of the saints from that rapture, which bore up on its wings
His marvellous Soul right into the fires of the Divinity 1

Look at the adoration of the Soul of Jesus ! That vast
ocean of created worship, in whose immense tranquillity each
spirit of angel and each soul of man is but a wave rolling
onward to the throne of God, and breaking there in soft
thunders of perpetual song, — how refreshing is the inward
picture of it to our love of God and to our pining for His
glory ! The eye travels over that radiant ocean, exults in its
vastness, tranquillises itself in the certainty of its profound
invisible depths, drinks in the unearthly, and yet not wholly
unearthly, sounds of its majestic waters, and watches with
an unwearied pleasure, in which hours pass like moments,
each wave as it approaches the shining coast crest itself with
light, lift up on high its green transparent wall of water,
break with solemn sound in showers of light, and creep
with its sheet of broken silver up the sloping shore, as if to
kiss the sand and to be sucked in while in the act of kissing
it. Of a truth the adoration of the Soul of Jesus was in
itself a creation tenfold more magnificent than the whole of
this grand universe. It was a depth which only the pleased
mind of God could search ; and only the divine wisdom

HEAVEN ALREADY. 423

could disport itself in the secret life of those enchanted
gardens which decked the bottom of that ocean. It lay ever
before God in the peace of unutterable gladness. Yet the
varieties of His acts, such as His acts of consecration,
oblation, praise, thanksgiving and congratulation, were so
many quickenings of His vast joy. They were almost
momentary new creations of it, fresh worlds, endless self-out-
pouring oceans, successive infinities, because of the worth each
act received from the touch of the Person of the Word.

How gently He sleeps on Mary's knee, and yet how
beautiful the vigil He is keeping in His unslumbering Soul !
At this moment He is exulting with joy in all creation. The
wisdom which made it all lies open before Him. The
grandest advance of human science hardly gets beneath the
surface of this wisdom ; it can scarcely sink deep enough to
hide itself under the waters, while it often wrinkles the
surface and disturbs the clearness by the vehemence of its
efforts. To the poet, the artist, and the man of science,
creation, seen through the mists which always teasingly
envelope it to us, is so beautiful that it often fascinates our
souls, and leads them away from God, as if the medicines
which should strengthen us only made us light-headed because
we are so weak. What then must creation be when it stands
unclouded and confessed in the splendour of the divine
wisdom 1 Yet so it always stood to the rejoicing Soul of
Jesus. Even to us the power which made it all seems
marvellously gentle ; it sleeps under the green turf that is
earth's vesture, or whispers in the leafy woods, or tinkles in
the streams, or hides under the blue calms of ocean, or comes
with its awfulness smoothed into quiet beauty from the
distant starry spheres. It only speaks a loud word now and
then in the threatening earthquake, or the sullen storm, or
in the brief fury of the volcano. But the calm majesty of
omnipotence, its gentleness, its tenderness, its love, the

434 HEAVEN ALREADY.

exquisite delicacy of its self-restraints, combined with its
terrific and immeasurable strength, — how wonderful must
they have seemed to our Lord's Human Soul ! Still more,
if we may talk as if He made comparisons, did His Infant
Heart rejoice in the love which circulates in every sinuous
pore of the vast universe, as though it were the blood within
its veins. He travelled in delighted thought, with speech-
less accompaniment of praise, along all these innumerable
winding-paths of creative love, sedulous that there should
not be one obscure corner in all the countless worlds, where
His Father's love should not be discovered, confessed, and
worshipped with created love. But nature was almost a
second beatific vision to Him, when from the eminences of
His science He looked over all its regions in one compre-
hensive view, and beheld there, mirrored with astonishing
fidelity, the image of the Most Holy Trinity. All the joys,
and surely they have neither been few nor shallow, of poets,
artists, and philosophers, were united and surpassed in this
joy of the Babe of Bethlehem in the radiant significance and
divine enigma of creation.

He rejoiced too, with a second joy, and one in which
creatures can have some share, to whom the unquestioned
sovereignty of God is the dearest of all doctrines and the
sweetest of all devotions, — He rejoiced in the decrees of His
Divine Person regarding creation. To His Human Soul the
splendours of the Divine Attributes nowhere shone more
clearly or more attractively than in the Divine Decrees.
One while they were glorious with the beauties of the storm,
another while no less glorious in the beauties of the calm.
They sang songs around the throne. They were universal
harmonies, in whose concords all the divine perfections and
all created things were blended into melody. They em-
broidered eternity into the grand patterns of time, and
somehow eternity was brightened, not disfigured, by the

HEAVEN ALREADY. 425

work. In their light the perfections of God contended not
with one another, but all throbbed in the one pulse of the
divine simplicity. In their light all the difficulties of crea-
tion were seen to be but the exquisite workmanship at the
points where it was most closely joined to God. In their
light He saw the mystery of God's liberty magnified, not
restricted, by the fixity of His decrees ; while the liberty of
the creature was secured, by their limitations alone, in a
plenitude which could not otherwise have belonged to it.

How unutterable must have been the joy of His Human
Soul in the knowledge that all these decrees were but the
beams of His own brightness, only seemingly parted by the
inaccessible clouds through which they come to us, and
which separate them into beams, while of a truth the bright-
ness behind is indivisible and one ! His decrees made crea-
tion so much more dear to Him, that in them chiefly we
seek for the deep-lying reasons of His love of creatures.
Hence it was also because of them, that the Divine Babe
exulted so ineffably, as the Book of Wisdom teaches us, in
sharing now through His created nature in His own creation,
as if creation were at once so lovely, and by Him so tenderly
beloved, that it drew Him out of Himself into its bosom.
He could not let us have creation all to ourselves. He too
must share it. A created nature shall be the choice inherit-
ance of the Uncreated Son of God.

The third joy of the Infant Jesus was His delight in His
Sacred Humanity. The use of His reason was an endless
pleasure to Him. Every operation of His mind was accom-
panied with joy, and that from various causes. It rose
from the harmony and perfection of His Human Kature,
from the excellence of His science, from His sanctity, and
from the Hypostatic Union. Even His senses were inlets
to Him of holiest joy, as they will be with the Glorified in
heaven, although His sensible glory lay shrouded under the

426 HE A VEN A LREA DY.

common veils of infancy. To His man-loving Heart there
was also a peculiar joy in His feeling of kin to all human-
kind. A brother multiplies himself in the love of his
brothers. There is something special in fraternal love to
double and treble self, and to add to the lives we already
live. This is a gift peculiar to fraternal love, which filial,
parental, or conjugal love have not, or have it differently.
They create other coequal selves. Fraternal love miracu-
lously multiplies our one same self. The Infant Jesus was
brother to every born and unborn child of man, He
saw all His brothers the world over in all its successive
ages. He lived by anticipation in their hearts with minutest
knowledge and most detailed sympathies. Their hearts
had all their separate places in His Sacred Heart, and were
cherished there as if He had but one brother, and could not
sufficiently environ him with love. From eternity His de-
light had been to be with the children of men, and now His
eternal desire was satisfied, and His Soul drank always and
drank deeply of this perennial fountain of fraternal love.*

From His love of men, fallen or unfallen, the transition
is natural to His redeeming love, and to His love of suffering
which by His own law that redeeming love involved. He
rejoiced therefore in His Sacred Humanity, as giving Him,
what His Divine Nature could not by possibility have given
Him, and which but for the miraculous intervention of
infinite wisdom it must even have rendered impossible for
His Human Nature, namely, the power of sufi'ering. It
opened out for Him three regions of suffering, every one of
which He traversed in its fullest extent, and as never man
has traversed them before or since. The body is gifted

* Sister Mary of Agreda beautifully says of our Lady that a great love
of men was one of the chief graces which she received preparatory to the
Incarnation, in order that our Lord as Man might receive this quality
from her by inheritance, as one of the transmitted dispositions of His
Mother. Mistica Ciudad, p. ii. 1. iii. cap. iii. In the whole range of
Marian theology I have met with no deeper or sweeter thought than this.

HEAVEN ALREADY. 427

with powers of diversified agony, which it makes us some-
times shudder to think of. The possibilities of fleshly pain,
which may intervene between ourselves and the shelter of
the grave, are so overwhelming that the contemplation of
them is unwise. Yet there never was a body, which was
gifted to open out such avenues of pain as His ; and, as
far as we have light to see in the dim depths of the Passion,
all of them were pursued to the uttermost. With a like
completeness He explored the Soul in all its capabilities of
anguish ; and here again His Soul was like no other soul,
because it was so pre-eminently endowed with the ability
to suffer. A man's reputation is his external self, and is a
third department of suffering in which we are all most tender,
and where the bitterest part of our probation here is
destined to be inflicted upon us. Jesus gave His away, as
a man flings his garment to an angry beast, and it was torn
in shreds ; so that His nakedness upon the Cross became
but the outward symbol of the extremity of His shame.
These were three kingdoms with which His Human Nature
gifted Him, and He wore them amongst the dearest jewels
of His crown. It is true that sufi'ering had become neces-
sary, by the necessity of redemption. Yet we must look
somewhat deeper. His Sacred Heart was probably not
different from what it would have been in a purely glorious
Incarnation, had there been no sin at all. Hence His love
of suffering was not a new original instinct, an exotic
transplanted into His Heart with the passibility of His Flesh,
but only a new form which His exceeding love of creatures
necessarily took under the circumstances of a fallen world.

The joy of His Human Nature in His Divinity was a fourth
fountain of blessedness in His Infant Heart. It is useless to
speak of its joy in its union with the Divine Person. We
cannot only conceive no greater joy, but we cannot conceive
how so great a one as this was possible to a created natura

428 HE A VBN ALREADY.

No power short of God's could have upheld it from sinking intc
annihilation under a burden so overwhelming. How was it
not shivered to pieces, how was it not burned up, how did it
not escape out of its own existence to elude the intolerable
glory of such a fiery yoke ? These are the questions we ask
ourselves. We cannot describe such things. There is always
something of a literary weariness in writing of these things
of God. Epithet must be piled on epithet, like Pelion
upon Ossa; adverb must qualify adjective, or intensify
substantive, to distinguish between the manner in which
what is said of creatures may also be said of God; reite-
rated superlatives annoy the taste and tease the attention,
and yet how dare we write otherwise than superlatively
of the mysteries of God? It is not the style only that
is studded with superlatives; the subjects treated of are
themselves intrinsically superlative, and whichever way
we turn, all are equally superlative, leaving upon our
minds, when the dew of sensible devotion is exhaled, a
weary sense of tryannical exaggeration. Thus the Areo-
pagite, striving up to his subject with his new-coined
words, displeases us, and doubtless displeased himself still
more, with his " super-essential," " super-celestial," and the
rest ; and yet he ends by making deep things clear to us,
though reader and writer both pay for it by the uniformity
of exaggeration. The matter spoils the style; but it is a
matter for which it is well worth while to spoil even less
external things than style. But even so, with all the license
of exaggeration, we can neither find nor fancy words to picture
the joy of our Lord's Human Nature in His Divinity.

Nevertheless the manner of the union is also to be con-
sidered as a distinct and separate joy from the union itself,
leading deeply down into the divine perfections, and having
the eminence of singularity, which belongs to so very few
of the works of God. That work, utterly hidden from us

HEAVEN ALREADY. 429

in its secret method, was joyously explored by His amazed
and delighted Soul. In this joy, there was another joy,
which also lay apart. He rejoiced particularly in the
ravishing beauty of the Person of the Word, in those
mysterious appropriations which distinguished the Second
Person from the First or Third. Doubtless also, in the
obscure caverns of His incomprehensible gladness, there
was even a joy in the absence of a human personality from
His Human Nature. There was an incomparable dependence
in this, which was full of excess of bliss, like the transported
tremblings which have seized the saints when their souls within
them suddenly widen into immensities, without land-marks,
beacons, or pole-star, and they float helplessly out to sea upon
the sovereignty of God. We must add to all this, His Soul's
enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, and the marvel of its
already enjoying it while He lay an Infant upon Mary's knee.
The saints lead joyous lives even amidst their austerities
and suflferings. Blind as we are, we can see that there is a
vaster joy in one hour of a saint's holiness, than in all the
outspread mediocrity of lives like ours, prolonged for any
number of years. If all emanations of God are joyous,
holiness is confessedly the most joyous of them all. Have
we ourselves ever experienced a joy in life, which was equal
to the common joy of being in a state of grace 1 But the
joy of holiness is this joy intensified, and perhaps indeed
it is something more than even that. Holiness is a very
spacious thing, and God always fills in all hearts all the
room which is left Him there. But holiness is not only an
exceeding joy, but it is gifted with a serene capacity of
enjoying its own joy, which is by no means universal in the
case of other joys. Nevertheless by thus thinking of such
joy of holiness in the saints as we can ourselves imperfectly
understand, are we really approaching to any standard by
which we can measure this fifth joy, the joy of the Infant

430 HEAVEN ALREADY.

Jesus in His surpassing holiness 1 If the holiness is like no
other, so is the joy Hke no other also. We have seen how
lovingly He rejoiced in creation. But it is just His loving-
ness which makes creation perfect. Creation culminates in
Him. This is the reason all else looks so imperfect. Crea-
tion to be understood must be looked at in Him. His holi-
ness is the filling up of all its empty places, the fruitful crop
of its salt seas, the habitableness of its mountain-tops, the
verdure of its deserts, the sweet God-praising population of
its solitudes. He rejoices in His unspeakable purity. Purity
is most dear to God. He bears His own spotlessness in His
Bosom as if it were the attribute of His predilection, which
He cherishes as a mother cherishes her first-born. He
rejoices in the purity of creatures.* He finds no other fault,
where things are pure. Purity of intention is the wood that
sweetens all bitter waters. The power of a pure intention is
the natural miracle of the spiritual life. The purity of
Mary ravished the Eternal Word Himself from heaven. But
what is her purity, immaculate Mother as she was, compared
with the purity of His Human Nature, and how inexpres-
sibly dear to His Divine Person must it be, while He rejoices
to find united to Himself, and so singularly His own, a spot-
lessness far excelling that which drew Him down to earth
when He beheld it in His Mother 1

It was a joy to Him, and a joy for almost a hundred
reasons, that He was the fountain of holiness and merit to
so many millions of His creatures, both before His coming
and after it. It was a delight to Him, that, like a forecast
shadow. His holiness had had such imperial power before
ever it was yet created. He exulted to see the legions of
angels, like an endless perspective of light, clothed in
splendour out of His human holiness. He looked onward

* It is said in some revelations of the saints that chastity is the most
special of all the fruits of redemption.

I

HEAVEN ALREADY. 431

into the ages wearily climbing the mountains of time one
after anotlier, and it gladdened Him to see how all earth
was growing like a garden as the breath of His holiness
blew upon it. Unrisen suns rose in His Soul, and touched
with light the fruits and flowers of far- distant sanctity.
Their fragrance came up to Him from a long way off, as the
spice winds tremble far over the bosom of the Indian seas.
He saw Egyptian Thebaids, and many another unlikely spot,
studded with enclosures of such rare exotic foliage and scent
and bravery, that no fabulous garden of the Hesperides
might come near to their spiritual beauty. They were
corners of earth, despised nooks of the world, in which the
odour of His sanctity hung for a moment, and exhaled to
heaven in these gorgeous though transitory Edens. All
Edens, alas ! are transitory ; but all Edens are the breath
of the holiness of Jesus. He looked up to heaven. His
human holiness was outstretched above like the canopy of
its roof, and outspread below like the glowing pavement of
its courts, and diffused through its magnificent abodes as the
light that lighted it and the odour that made it sweet. Thus
it is His sanctity that colonises heaven, while it is also the
sole ever-active principle of beautiful life on earth. As God,
so Goethe said (for big divine thoughts wandered strangely
in his pagan mind), is ever in higher natures attracting
lower, and so working in creation, Jesus, we may add, is the
lever, or rather the magnet, to raise and elevate all creation
to its resting-place in the Creator, whence it has so sadly
fallen. It is by His holiness that He does this work ; and
with what astonishing activity of joy must not such a work
be necessarily accompanied^

There are many things we wait to learn in heaven, because
out of heaven they are so poorly taught. Is not Mary one
of these, and her love of Jesus, and His love of her, and a
thousand secrets of her Immaculate Heart, which have not

432 HEAVEN ALREADY.

teased us here, because it was so sufficiently sweet to love
that we did not care to know ? Thus we come to the foun-
tain of His love of Mary in the Heart of the Infant Jesus,
His sixth joy, and we sit down there, as if idly musing.
We know it is an unfathomable fountain, and it is joy
enough for us to sit and watch it flow. So men watch
mountain springs for hours, throwing up their pulses of
crystal water with the lightest tinkling sound, like the
laughter of children. Uninjured, the charmed margin of
parti-coloured moss cushions that little sighing mouth of the
huge mountain, and indeed of the old ancient earth, and the
gleaming pebbles lie just inside its lips, as if to make it
articulate and give it the power of song. They who sit
there care not for the rocky veins in which those crystal
threads have flowed so slenderly, until many of them were
gathered into one to form this spring. They do not puzzle
themselves with the subterranean wonders those bright
wavelets have seen, or the remote action of the uneasy earth
which long epochs since may have settled that this rocky pore
should be their orifice. The flowing of the water is enough
for them, a joy to mark a day with such strong light that it
shall be visible in memory when years have passed away.

So it is with this fountain of filial love in the Heart of
the Babe of Bethlehem. It was a joy of which we see but
the outward signs of life, as the pulses beat beneath the
skin. Who can tell His power of loving 1 Who can tell
her worthiness of being loved 1 Yet, till he has first told
these, who shall tell our Lord's joy in loving her 1 He re-
joiced in the perfection of His natural filial love of her.
This seems an easy thing to say; yet the thing intended,
and so simple-sounding, passes our comprehension : for He
is God. How shall God, in the exclusive majesty of His
paternity, burn with filial feeling towards one whom He
has created out of nothing 1 Everywhere the grand portenli

HEAVEN ALREADY. 433

of the Hypostatic Union stands in our path, not so much
forbidding ingress to the inner shrines, as giving light to
illuminate the wondrous way. Everywhere it meets us, and
makes things astonishing which would else be commonplace.
Everywhere it refuses to explain itself, and faith has to
render those truths certain and familiar, which else would,
even to our reverence, be incredible.

He rejoices also in her sweet love of Him. The incense
of a whole creation is less to Him than the grateful purity
of her fragrant love. It is the breath of her beautiful
being, and He nestles in it as if it were a new life even to
Him. He grows upon her love, as if it were His nourish-
ment. He lays His Infant Life down in it that the
splendour may play upon it, and lets it rest there as if it
had found a heaven upon earth. He clothes His little
frame in her love, as if it were in shining angelic garments,
and His bath is in the warmth of that clean love which
His own Precious Blood has rendered thus incomparably
bright. As He inhales her love, He delights in having
created her. It is a joy beyond all price, a marvellous joy,
that the Son should have created His own Mother. He
delights in having saved her, saved her from sin by His
never letting it come nigh her, redeemed her from captivity
by never allowing her to be taken captive ; and is it not an
even yet more marvellous joy, that the Son should be the
eternal Saviour of His youthful Mother, and should have
saved her with so glorious a salvation before ever He Himself
was born 1 In both cases — such a Son ! such a Mother !
It is a jubilee to have one so like Himsell It is another
jubilee for Him to take His likeness from another, as He
did eternally from His Father. It is another jubilee for
Him to have a creature to whom He can be like, who wore
His features before He wore them Himself, and who was
the dear cause of His wearing them at alL The uncreated

434 HBA VEN ALREADY.

son exults in having a created type. Furthermore, there ia
another joy which we will daringly conjecture in His love of
Mary. As the Trinity of Persons makes the Godhead never
lonely, though it is supremely one, so Mary's love, which was
the offspring of her immense holiness, may please Him by
making His human merits seem less lonely, less exceptional,
less utterly detached from the rest of created holiness.

Saints, like beautiful scenes, require to be leai-ned. We
must dwell by the side of such scenes in a sort of expectant
passiveness, and let the changes of the seasons, the lights
of the various hours from dawn to deep night, the alter-
nations of storm and calm, and the many-coloured garment
of the year, disclose to us the capabilities and realities of
magnificent landscapes. So with the saints. We do not
know them at first sight. We do not appreciate their
sanctity. We do not discriminate between the different
shades of their holiness. We do not instinctively seize
upon that which is their divine characteristic, the singu-
larity of their grace, the unshared peculiarity of their
position as ornaments in the Church of God. Yet some
saints reveal themselves to us more rapidly than others.
They flash upon us. They leap up before us like a sunrise
at sea. Their brightness tells their whole history at once.
TTxen again there are other saints, the very expression of
whose sanctity is mantled with a look of almost impene-
trable reserve. The supernatural is so deep down in them
that it is hidden. The currents of life have passed so
calmly and innocuously over them that they have not laid
the character bare, or discovered the strata over which they
flow. These saints have not been placed in dramatic
positions. Their histories are veiled in commonplaces.
We should not take them for heroes on the surface. We
only know that they are heroes, because the Church has
raised them on the altars. The great St. Joseph is one of

HEAVEN ALREADY. 435

this latter class of saints. We must be a dweller in his
land. We must live near his door at Nazareth, and watch
him. He will grow upon us like a divine thing. He will
open out before us, and give out his meanings, like a gradual
patient revelation. The very ages of the Church have had
thus to learn him, as well as his individual devotees. Each
age almost has given expression to its surprise at finding
him a mountain of much more considerable altitude, than
had heretofore been supposed. It is this which makes us
feel that we are never speaking worthily about him. Yet
how often have we needful cause to speak of him in this
excursion of ours into the land of Bethlehem !

His joy in St. Joseph was the seventh joy of the Infant
Jesus. He rejoiced in the tranquil depths of his interior
holiness, and especially in the incomparable hiddenness of
liis spiritual life. He rejoiced in Joseph's love of Him, and
in His own love of Joseph. He brooded with complacency
on the image of the whole Trinity which reflected itself
with such calm detail upon Joseph's single soul. He was
the shadow and created image of the Eternal Father.
Astonishingly faithful was the portraiture in its modest
created littleness. But to His inexplicable joy the Son
beheld also in His Foster-father a second Self, inasmuch as
He was the true uncreated image of the Father, while Joseph
was the Father's authentic created shadow ; and thus Joseph
was His own shadow also. Moreover as the Spouse of
Mary He beheld in him the similitude of the Holy Ghost.
Neither were these such faint analogies as may be found in
the work and character of ordinary saints. They were
actual official realities, authentic divine appointments, with
all that depth of chiselling and sharpness of outline and
unwasting hardness of material, which distinguish the
mysteries of the Incarnation from all the other operations of
divine grace. Over all this, like the unity of a pensive

436 HBA VEN ALRBAD Y.

tender twilight, was spread a genuine human love of the old
man for his own dear sake, and simply because he was so
attractive an object of affectionate honour and of gentlest
love. It was not only the creature who was in Joseph's
place whom He loved with such deep tenderness; but it
was Joseph himself because he was Joseph, because his
peculiar, distinctive, personal character was so attractive and
so beautiful. His gifts indeed were lovely ; but he loved,
not the gifts only, but the man himself, and with a filial
love which might be parcelled out among all the fathers
upon earth and make them all more happy than they could
well believe. Joseph's love of Him, a love which far sur-
passed in grandeur and in tenderness the united loves of all
the fathers that have ever been,* a love so amazing, so vast,
and so various that we may say of him that in his paternity
all paternities on earth share and yet exhaust it not, was to
Jesus an unfathomable delight reaching to unimaginable
sublimities. It gave room even to His immensities of filial
love to develop and expatiate. At the same time, Joseph's
heavenly Heart, so like Mary's Immaculate Heart, and yet
80 distinctly different, so like His own Sacred Heart, and
yet also so distinctly different, was to Him a jubilee of
itself ; because it was in its own self a world more than
equalling in size and price the common world of men,
wherein His insatiable love of men could outpour itself in
deluges of impetuous affection, and His unquenchable thirst
for human love find inexpressible relief, though it could not
quench itself. Joseph's love of Mary was also an incredible
joy to our Blessed Lord, and Mary's love of Joseph was
another joy : for it is the love of Jesus and Mary for Joseph,
of Jesus and Joseph for Mary, and of Mary and Joseph for
Jesus, which constitutes the unity of that Earthly Trinity.
The angelic hosts worship the Infant Word as He lies
* Mistica Ciudad. p. ii. 1. iv, cap. xxviii.

HEAVEN ALREADY. 437

speechless on His Mother's lap. Their worship is another
joy, the eighth joy, of His Sacred Infancy. For ages they
have hymned His glory round the throne above. He knows
each spiritual voice in all that countless choir. Their adora-
tion has been the incessant ritual of heaven, while the huge
epochs of the ripening earth have been evolving slowly.
There is not one of those spirits who has not bathed in His
Bplendours since the first dawn of its existence. What then
is there new in their worship now 1 Why should it affect
His Heart with such unwonted joy ?

There is truly a new significancy in their worship. There
is an additional spiritual gracefulness in their attitude, a
peculiar loveliness which was not there before. The primal
vision of the ancient heavens has been shown them in its
reality. The Sacred Humanity, which they had been called
to worship in the mind of God, is now before them in fact
and substance. They see the very Child actually present,
whose figure in the divine decrees had been the matter of
their probation and the occasion of their perseverance. He
is before them in the material loveliness of His Flesh and
Blood. He is receiving their worship now as Man. They
are paying their homage to Him as their elder brother. A
change has come over the former ceremonial of their worship,
or rather a fresh service has been added to it, a new solemnity
instituted, with the jubilant applause of all those joyous hosts.
They are all of them acting over again that action in which
they won their crown, the act of swearing their allegiance to
His inferior nature, His nature naturally subordinate to theirs.
It is a joy to Him as God, because it is a grand service of
praise in honour of the Incarnation. It is a joy to Him be-
cause of His exceeding jealous love of His Humanity. It
is a joy to Him, because it is so great a joy to them.

He delights in their worship also as His Mother's
•ubjects. It is an object of exultation with Him that He

438 HEA VBN A LREA DY.

has provided so fair an empire for her sway, and snhjects of
such attractive holiness, diversity, and multitude. He
knows how she will love the angels, and how the angels
will love her, and both these thoughts are fountains of glad-
ness within His Soul. He sees her unending government of
them, lying before Him like some future chronicle of heaven^
its pages gleaming with deeds of sacred emprise and the
heroic wonders of angelic sanctity. He joys to think also
how she and they will joy to see their vacant ranks filled
up, and all their companies augmented, by the conquests of
His incarnate love. It is always a peculiar pleasure to Hin
to contemplate His own exaltation of His Mother, especially
when it is reflected in the rest of creation. But there is a
character almost pathetic in this new worship of the angels.
There is something human like in their humility, as if they
had with swiftest apprehension caught the genius of a man's
spirit from ministering to the Humanity of Jesus. How
like the lowly self-abjection, the unpretending renunciation
of a mortal saint, is their disinterested joy, because man's
inferior nature is exalted above their own ! There seem to
be no regrets travelling back to their once bright brethren,
to whom no second trial, no opportunity of penance, was
accorded. They appear almost to love the assumed nature
of the Word better because it is not theirs but ours. They
put themselves aside as if they were unworthy, and seem to
forget that their nature as well as ours might have been
assumed ; while on the other hand, they seem never to forget
that they were saved themselves by the worship of that far-
seen Humanity, which now they behold in Bethlehem. The
grandeur of this lowliness, the gracious sweetness of this gene-
rosity, what joy it all is to the Heart of the Infant Jesus !

But He finds a grandeur even in us, and out of that
grandeur extracts a joy, a ninth joy of His Sacred Infancy.
Admirable in all His ways, in nothing is the goodness of

HBA VBN A LREA DY. 439

God more surprising than in the pains which He appears
to take to justify His excess of love towards us. He
condescends to look as ii He were inventing reasons by
the assistance of His wisdom; and the reasons are rather
to satisfy us and remove stumbling-blocks out of the way
of our faith, than to satisfy Himself ; for to Him His own
goodness is an all-sufficient reason, a goodness which to us
would be incredible, unless it condescended to explain itself
and justify its excesses. Hence it is from the Hypostatic
Union that the Infant Jesus draws His immense joy in
His love of us, and that seemingly exaggerated appreciation
of us, which is the basis of His love. He rejoices in us as
His creatures, whom His own hand has fashioned. There
is not one of us whom He has not called out of nothingness.
Each of us existed in His mind before we existed in fact.
He developed a separate idea of His own in the creation of
each separate soul of man. He meant us to be just what
we are in blood and race, in genius and character, and in
our individual work for Him. In all things, sin excepted,
and the multifarious unhappiness which comes of sin, we
are what He would have us be, and what He distinctly
intended us to be. We are a joy to Him, therefore, as
His children, with that intimate sonship which comes out
of the tender relationship of creation. But He rejoices in
us as His creatures, with a joy in which something mingles
that in human love would have looked like gratitude or the
sense of obligation, things which cannot be in God. The
meaning of this mysterious appearance is, that, as His
creatures, we entered into the knowledge whereby He is
for ever the Father's Word. We then had our share, may
we say such words? in His Eternal Generation.* The
Father knew Himself, and in Himself He knew all

* See Macedo. CoUationes. Ooll. ix. Differ, i. sect. 5, where the
Thomist doctrine is compared with that of Scotus.

440 HEAVEN ALREADY,

creatures, singly and collectively, and it was His whole
knowledge which produced the Son. Together with the
abysses of His own perfections, every creature was pro-
nounced in the uncreated Word which He uttered from the
beginning. We all entered into the speechless music of
that Word ; and this is a thought to make us fear, and to
abash us because it is so overwhelming. Yet of a truth it
was a thought that entered into that joy of the Infant
Jesus which arose from His love of us as His creatures.

But He rejoiced in us as His brothers also. Our nature
was pleasant to Him. From eternity it had been so
delectable to Him, that He would have assumed it in an
impassible Incarnation even if we had not fallen. Hence
He feels His blood to all of us. He rejoices, as we all
rejoice ourselves, in the feeling of kindred, and in the pre-
dilections of its mysterious sympathies. No clansman ever
felt 80 wedded to his clan, so committed to its fortunes,
so enthusiastic in its honour, as the Infant Jesus felt with
regard to the whole race of man. Immense as was His
joy in the angels, there was a joy in His preference of our
nature over theirs, not only because in all things that He did
there was inevitable joy, but because of the ** cords of flesh "
which drew Him to our race. Nay, He even rejoiced in us as
sinners, not because we were sinners, God forbid ! but as sin-
ners whom He had come to redeem, and therefore whom He
loved with a new love, a love additional to the many kinds
of love wherewith He would have loved unfallen man.

For dare we think He would have loved us more if we
had not fallen? Does not Scripture seem to speak as if
the excess of our misery had also pushed the love of God
into excess? Does it not speak as if our failure under
our trial had been itself a further trial of our Father's love,
under which His love had not been wanting, but had
outstripped in swiftness and had outdone in quantity our

HEA VEN ALREADY. 441

own amazing guilt 1 This fresh love was a love more full
of pity, assuming in its sweet ministries and easy conde-
scensions the semblance of that blindness which marks
maternal love, a quickness to see all that appeals to com-
passion and so will augment love, and a slowness to see
what might sadden love or dash its promptitude. We
must dare to say such things even of the immutable God.
It was a love based on the greater efforts which it was to
cost Himself in His sufferings and His death; and the
grandeur of these efforts was the measure of the grandeur
of this love. It was as if His first love had laid broad
foundations, and built a glorious temple thereupon. But
we forfeited what little claim we might have seemed to
have to this resplendent temple of His love. Whereupon
He pulled it down, and drew the lines further, and widened
the trenches, and laid a vaster foundation, and raised a
fabric on the ruin of His old work, which we had caused,
tenfold more magnificent than the original structure evei
would have been. Is this what the Church means when
she bids us sing of Adam's "happy fault," as if God's
honour found " good luck," or " prosperity," as the psalmist
words it, in the misfortune of the fall 1

But His Infant Heart finds yet a tenth joy in the foreseen
love of men for Him. At first sight there is a strangeness
in the value which He sets upon our love, and the intense
desire which He seems to have for it. But it is a strange-
ness, which is so far from wearing away that it grows upon
us the longer we look at it. It becomes more and more
unfamiliar. It rather chills us with fear than sets us at our
ease. At last it grows shadowy and indistinct, and appears
to melt away as if it were no reality; and, did not faith
come to the rescue of our poor-spiritedness, it would shortly
seem a thing downright incredible. Now, as He lies on
Mary's lap, what is it that He sees, which so lights up Hia

442 HEAVEN ALREADY.

eye 1 His look is not turned upward, as it so often is, upon
His Mother's face. It is not Joseph He is looking at, with
that infantine curiosity, not wholly unmingled with awe,
which we have so often read upon His countenance when
His look has been fixed on Joseph. What is it that He
sees ? The Church lies like an open field before Him ; and
He beholds the sufferings of His martyrs, the perfections of
His saints, the thickly-strewn heroisms of multitudes of His
servants, the grandeur of manifold vocations, varieties of
goodness, which are rather singularities than varieties as
they never seem to be exactly repetitions of each other,
triumphs of the Church diversified by the ages of the world
and the shapes of successive evil over which she triumphs,
each shape of evil deeming itself new and insuperable and
raised above the lot of those other errors which have sunk
into oblivion ; and with these also He beholds faith's end-
less victory, and its pre-eminence in all progresses and over
all mutable civilisations. All this spectacle is representative
to Him of an immensity of human love, which flows into His
Heart like a broad stream of joy, and is received there as in
a capacious lake, dilating the Heart itself, and quickening
with delight the pulses of the Precious Blood.

We too pass before Him, one by one, dust-besprinkled
pilgrims, and His eye follows us, looks long at us, and will
know us again, and smile upon us as old acquaintances,
when the misty ages shall have travelled up into the
present, and brought us before Him again in our actual
pilgrimage, though He will always have been thinking of
each of us through all those misty ages. He sees our con-
versions, our struggles, our faith, our trembling hopes, our
timidly aspiring love, and our foreseen, if so be, persever-
ance. Already He hears our prayers in the distance, like
the striking of the village clock at night in the valley on
the mountain's other side. There is a vivid joy to Him in

HEAVEN ALREADY. 443

U alL Each day as we walk from morning to night across
oiie more breadth of life, measured out to us by that over-
seer of God whose solar light calls us to our work and keeps
our time, what a chastening thought, cheering or depress-
ing, as we choose to make it, it is to accompany us, that we
actually entered into, and formed a part of, and sent a fresh
thrill through, the joys of the Babe of Bethlehem.

He found an eleventh joy even in the foresight of His
Passion. The littleness of His Human Heart could hardly
hold the grandeur of His joy. It opened itself wide to
embrace the mighty sacrifice. It planted the Cross in the
centre of its infant flesh, as if Calvary were henceforth to
be the very sunshine of Bethlehem and Nazareth. It bade
the Passion act itself henceforth like an endless drama
before His eyes, whether He watched or slept. He wel-
comed with joy, yea with an avidity of joy, each one of the
bodily pains, each one of the mental agonies, each one of
the outward shames, of the Passion, as if each was a con-
soling satisfaction of the fever of His man-loving Heart,
and a grateful safety-valve of the almost unmanageable
fire that was pent up there. His thoughts luxuriated in
the prodigal exuberance of His Bloodsheddings, until His
eye gleamed at the vision of the pavement of Jerusalem
all crimsoned with the streams of His precious life, as a
mountain-top gleams down into the vale when it looks into
the yet invisible sun-rise, and gives its bright witness of a
spectacle which from below we cannot see. There is
something marvellous, something which looks immoderate,
as afterwards when He went swiftly up to Jerusalem
straitened with impatience for His Passion, something un-
like His usual adorable tranquillity, though in truth it was
but a perfection of it, in the exultation which bounds in
His Infant Heart over the unfathomable humiliations of
Calvary. It seems as if it was more than He expected,

444 HEAVEN ALREADY.

more than He had dared to hope for, a surprise, and
accompanied with all the gladness of a surprise which tells
us that our fortune is brighter than we had anticipated. To
look at His sparkling eye, we should have deemed this
humiliation to be another beatific vision. He is radiant,
as if it were some novelty He saw, and so had gained for
Himself all the impossible glory of a novelty to the eternally
enthroned God, whose own eternity is His throne, and
His own beatitude His crown.

His twelfth and last joy, that is to say, the last which
we can reach in thought, for the want of love makes us
unimaginative in heavenly things, is His joy in being the
Saviour. This was to be the special gladness which He was
to pour over all nations. We were to call His Name Jesus,
because He should save His people from their sins. It was
Buch a joy to His Sacred Humanity as His unity is to God
Himself, the primal, crowning, all-including, self-suj9&cient
joy. There was to be but one Saviour. None shared His
office with Him. There is no God but One. There is no
Saviour but One. That One is the Babe of Bethlehem.
It is a glory all His own. No saint shares with Him this
exclusive privilege. No apostle is His partner in the unity
of this stupendous work. St. Joseph kneels down, and
adores without co-operating. Mary co-operates ; yet she has
first of all been saved by Him herself. Thus His Mother
falls away into her own modest magnificence, and leaves
Him inspired in the solitary light of His office as our
Saviour. It is He alone who does it all. The all He does
is the nearest of all created things to a veritable infinity.
The way in which He does it is clothed with all the splen-
dour and munificence with which the plenitude of God
can invest created office or created nature. It is as if at
once He drew away the light and air and space in which
the million- worlded universe pursues its way, and in their

HEAVEN ALREADY. 445

stead flung from the top of Calvary a rich immeasurable
effulgence which to all worlds and to all creatures should
henceforth be instead of light and air and space, a better
thing, a fresh receptacle for the huge creation, a new
method of universal life. He rejoiced unutterably. He
rejoiced in the magnitude of the work, in its difficulty, its
beauty, its multiplication, its endurance, its solitariness, its
acceptance by the Father. Each of these things have
glories in themselves which a whole treatise would fail to
exhaust. The motes in the sunbeams were but as a poor
little sheep-flock, easily counted in a mountain paddock
compared to the multitudinous graces which should outflow
from the fountains of salvation. His Heart glowed with
divinest satisfaction as He gazed on tlie abundance, the
variety, the unearthliness, the efficacy, the sublimity, and
above all, the likeness to Himself, of the graces He should
give, and give out of His own grace, the very grace which
was in Him at that moment in Bethlehem.

Here again every word carries with it a volume of theo-
logy, over which St. Michael's mind could spend an eternity
of intellectual contentment. But His jubilee rose higher
stiU. His Sacred Humanity thrilled in every faculty, as
the organ pipes thrill with sound, with exultation in the
glory of His Father, the glory with which He Himself as
the Saviour of the world should invest the amplitude of
His Eternal Sire. He looks over the vast infinity of His
Father's essential glory, which no created thing can touch,
nor outward assault come near to violate ; and He sees an
outer glory, lying like a pale rim around the other, wounded
like the ragged skirts of a storm-cloud when the lightning
or the wind have torn them, dim as the moonlight when it
is thickened and dishonoured by the steam of the vaporous
fens, and so jealous is He of the outermost glory of His
Father, of that merest skirt, of the most external appurten-

446 HEA VEN ALREADY.

ance of His honour, that He goes forth with haste to the
work of salvation, as a warrior hastens to the battle, that
the King of kings may not have to tarry for the victory.
He sees the glow of His Father's glory, when His wander-
ing creation is brought back to His Feet, He the Babe of
Bethlehem the sole leader of captivity captive, the sole
Saviour who has saved for His Father His Father's world.
No Mary, no angel, no saint, shares the topmost heights of
that exclusive prerogative. Only He has taken the Cross
into His alliance, and it is He, and He alone. He the one
Saviour, and such a Saviour — how unutterable the joy !
His soul is almost troubled with the delight, almost amazed
with the masterful excess of gladness. For ever that
thought is with Him. Mary even cannot fathom such a joy
as that. He hides Himself in the full depths of His own
Heart, and sings to Himself silent songs because there is no
other Saviour but Himself, and that He with such an infinitely
sweet salvation has saved His people from their sins.

Word of the Father ! who shall tell the joy thy Father's
glory was to Thy Human Nature? Who shall tell, as it
should be told, any one of the earthliest of these Thy joys 1
All this is but a conceivable drop or two of the ocean of
His joys, conceived by one of the least of His creatures
low down in an obscure nook of His creation. Yet it is
into these eternal joys of His, that He, by His saving love,
will make us enter, when He takes us out of His Bosom,
and when with a smile, like one of those He is smiling
now into Mary's face. He will lay us down in everlasting
safety, all faultlessly redeemed, at the Father's Feet. 0
weary life, faded and outworn before its sands are half
run out ! who would not that that hour was come, and that
our soul were lying, a panting, wondering, fresh-come thing,
in its nest at the Father's Feet, still trembling with the
surprise of its first eternal flight ?

( 447 )

CHAPTER IX.

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER

"We must end almost as we have begun. We dared at first
to climb up to the Bosom of the Father, and look over
into its ineffable abysses. Breathless with all we have
seen, and heard, or perhaps in our bewilderment have
dreamed, we come now to lie down at the Father's Feet,
hushed and trembling, yet with a contentment beyond
what we ever dared to hope. In His Bosom or at His
Feet, it is enough for us if the Father's shadow rest upon
as. If the Babe of Bethlehem will show us the Father,
that will suffice us. It would be a life well spent, for
so Margaret of Beaune was inspired to spend it, in learning
the lessons and loves, the sorrows and the joys, of the
Holy Childhood. But we must come now to what we may
call the final disposition of the Infant Jesus, that which
represents His whole Infancy, and indeed His whole
Self — represents, as it seems, both His Natures, and is at
once the greatest joy of His Divine Nature in His Human,
and the greatest contribution of His Human Nature to His
Divine — Devotion to the Eternal Father. Hitherto we
have been learning devotions to the Infant Jesus ; now we
come to practise devotion with Him, and to learn His own
special devotion from Him ; and this is in reality the
highest devotion to Him.

We must begin by making sure that we understand what

448 THE FEET OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

we are speaking of. We are speaking of devotion in our
Blessed Lord. Now devotion is a virtue of creatures.
It is the truthful attitude which creatures assume in
respect to their Creator, an attitude of the soul expressive
of the life of the soul, at times gathered up into particular
actions and concentrated in special rituals, yet not the less
expressive of its whole normal and habitual life. A devout
man is not merely devout when he is at his devotions.
He is always actually devout, or is always tending to
become so. The word devotion implies the immensity of
God's majesty, upon whose altar it lays the sacrifice it
has vowed. It expresses also the nothingness of the
creature, and the propriety, amounting to a necessity, of
its devoting itself to Him who called it out of nothing for
Himself. It signifies that promptitude and agility of self-
immolation, which is the perfect state to which it is
continually aspiring. It is the natural inward life of the
creature before the face of its Creator. But by grace it
is raised to a supernatural end, and is more than a becoming
posture in the presence of the Creator. It tends to union
with Him, to acceptable love of Him, to intelligent worship
of Him, to the possession of the Beatific Vision of Him,
and to a world of supernatural acts which bring about
what mystical theologians have dared to call a deification
of the creature. It is the mother of prayer, the admonitress
of humility, the hand and tongue of faith, the heart of
charity, the intelligence of self-abjection, the vitality of
perseverance. In short, it is the essence of our createdness,
pure, wholesome, legitimate, and full of fragrance.

Now we are predicating the existence of this quality in
our Blessed Lord, who was God Himself, altogether divine
in Person, but having an assumed and for ever now in-
separable Human Nature. We are not only predicating its
existence in Him, but also its perfection. What then do

THE FEET OP THE ETERNAL FATHER. 449

we mean by it in Him ? It is the excellence of His created
Nature, but in Him it is utterly dependent on His divine.
It belongs to Him exclusively in virtue of His created
Nature, yet its acts are not unaffected by His uncreated
Nature. It is tinged in some inefifable way with the
ineradicable unction of His Divine Person, so that its worth
becomes infinite, while itself remains finite. Devotion is
not the same thing in Him which it is in the saints, or
would have been in Him had He been simply an incom-
parably, even to us unimaginably holy person, but a created
person, not a Divine Person. Like all else about Him, and
indeed more than anything else about Him, His devotion
is steeped in the Hypostatic Union. For, while His devo-
tion can only come from His Human Nature, it must be
its characteristic that it is worthy of God and, in a sense,
equal to God's requirements, and it can only be so in
virtue of the Hypostatic Union, because it can only be
so through being glorified by the contact of His Divine
Person.

We must observe therefore that our Lord's devotion
is a true and real one, and not a mere figure of speech.
For the Sacred Humanity is not exempted from any of
the legitimate conditions of a created nature, except the
possession of a created person, and such consequences as
follow from * personality, in the matters of conscience,
self-consciousness, and the like. But this absence of a
human person in no way impaired the humanness, so
to call it, of His Human Nature. It was not in any
sense an imperfect humanity. On the contrary, it was
the most perfect of all humanities. It concentrated in
itgelf all those human peculiarities, belonging to humanity
as it was devised by God, and for which it was so tenderly
beloved by Him ; and it concentrated them in its single
self to a degree unknown to any other single human nature,

2 7

450 TUB FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

perhaps indeed so pre-eminently above those of all men
collectively that His single humanity represented in itself
the perfections of the whole human race, and something
more than was represented in the rest of the collective
race, a something belonging to His sovereign Humanity
alone. It might almost be an axiom : — The more human,
the more Christ-like. It is important to master this
truth. For it is not uncommon for pious believers, whose
orthodoxy is unimpeachable in the profession of their
faith, to fall into a practical error in their meditations, and
so in their spiritual life, most of whose elements make their
ingress into it through our meditations. These persons
realise the Hypostatic Union so badly, or with such an ill-
instructed indistinctness, that they practically conceive of our
Blessed Lord, as of some portent, as if there were something
monstrous (we must venture to write the dreadful word),
colossal, titanic, disproportionate, in His union of Two
Natures in one Person. Gradually in their minds the
miraculous, in the popular sense of that word as implying
some violation or suspension of nature, steals over our Lord's
life, and sequesters whole regions of it as lying outside of
what is imitable, and not to be regarded as offering even a
proportionate pattern to ourselves. Thus the motives of
perfection are weakened, and its treasures of example fatally
impoverished. Many other evil consequences follow from
the distortion of all the landscapes of the Incarnation, which
comes from this inaccurate and untruthful view. From all
this men would be delivered, if they bore in mind that the
absence of a human person is no deficiency in a human
nature. Our Lord's Human Soul was not blessedly crippled,
or gloriously deformed, because it had no human person to
rest upon. In ways we do not understand, but which the
secret laboratories of creation might disclose to us, it was
among the possibilities of creatures that an Uncreated Person

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 451

might be substituted for a created one, and that such a sub-
stitution should not be a violence, but a divinely congruous
exaltation.

Supposing that we did not already know from our
catechism that the Person of the Holy Trinity, who was
incarnate, was the Second Person, we should gather it from
our Lord's human devotion as it transpires in the four
Gospels. When we have long and deeply meditated on the
Incarnation, there is a new and peculiar interest to us in
every word which our Lord utters with respect to God.
We feel certain that much more is implied than is actually
said, and that the very manner in which things are said is
of itself full of disclosures to us of the majesty of God.
First of all, when we collect those of His sayings which
may be regarded as revelations of God, and view them as
one collected body of teaching, much results from the con-
templation which we had not before suspected. We then
review them all over again from a somewhat different point
of view, considering that He who uttered the words was
God Himself, and therefore spoke from something more than
either the abundance or the certitude of His knowledge. In
this fresh light we perceive new depths of meaning, and
glimpses of significancy which disclose to us places where
there are depths, though as yet we are unable to look down
into them.

But the full purport of His teaching about God is not
apprehended, even so far as we are able to apprehend it,
until we consider it from yet another point of view, re-
membering that He who speaks is not the First or the Third
Person of the Holy Trinity, but the Second. This sheds
quite a peculiar light upon His words. Expressions, which
hardly delayed our attention before, are now found to be
pregnant with meaning. Sometimes a distinctive light is
shed over whole couversatious, or on connected passage? oi

452 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER,

Scripture, like the prayer to the Father in the Gospel of St.
John. Reading and re-reading the Gospels, as those -will
naturally do who are striving to be men of prayer, it is of
no slight importance to us to have different and successive
points of view, whence we may look at that ground which
we are traversing so repeatedly that at last there is a danger
of the eye and the memory playing into each others' hands,
and whole pages of the Gospel sliding under our notice,
rather than engaging our reverent attention. Some have
striven to obviate this by reading the New Testament in
various languages, with which they are for the most part
less familiar than their own, and the amount of the difficulty
which the foreign language presents, however trifling it may
be, is sufficient to arrest the mind, and make the old narra-
tive in some sense new, and capable of striking us by salient
points which in more familiar languages we had not per-
ceived. This truly is a helpful practice. But so also is that
other one of reading the Gospels from some one carefully
selected point of view, a point of view selected for a reason,
and then from another point of view, and then another ; and
a very moderate acquaintance with theology will enable us
to vary them even beyond our needs. No life, however
long, will suffice to take us into the deepest depths of the
Gospels; but it is not a slight thing to be always going
deeper, or even to be only learning more and more how
astonishingly deep they are.

We gather then from the exhibitions of our Lord's human
devotion in the Gospels, apart from direct texts otherwise
establishing the doctrine, that He was the Second Person of
the Holy Trinity. We gather it from the wonderful things
said of the Father and the Holy Ghost, and His silence
about the Word. He indicates His own place in the Holy
Trinity in this covert way, as if it was not so much that He
was teaching us, as that He was practising His own devo

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 453

tion. Who would be silent about the Word, unless it were
the Word Himself 1 When He speaks the most strongly of
His own Divinity, it is His oneness with the Father upon
which He dwells, while He speaks of the Father and the
Holy Ghost as if in some way external to them. He con-
ceals Himself under the shadow of the Father. He asserts
His own Divinity, as it were with some reluctance, though
decisively. But, while He asserts it, He hides Himself in
His identity with the Father, as if the Father were ampler
and broader than Himself, and His Paternity a screen to
Him. He is continually putting forward His Father's glory
as the one object He is seeking, the one passion which
possesses Him.

Even His intense love of souls is to be gathered rather
from what He did and suffered, than from the direct mani-
festations of His devotion. If we were left to judge of His
office from His devotion, we should consider Him rather as
the restorer of His Father's glory than as the Saviour of
mankind, as a victim of reparation rather than a victim of
expiation. He is so jealous of the honour of the Holy
Ghost that He waxes warm when He speaks of it, and uses
words of a fearful severity, not only unusual on His lips,
but without any other example than the one furnished by
this solitary subject. He declares, that, while words against
Himself shall be pardoned, there is a peculiar limit with
regard to the Holy Ghost, which it is fatal for us to trans-
gress. Against the Second Person of the Holy Trinity all
things may be forgiven ; but against the Third there is an
unnamed sin, or state of sin, which is especially declared to
be beyond the reach of mercy, some stain which the Precious
Blood refuses to wash away on this side the grave, and on
which the wholesome fires of purgatory shall not be allowed
to act when the grave is passed.

We may perhaps be pardoned, if, in order to make our

454 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

meaning clear, we speak for a moment in a human way and
according to human conceptions. It is as if our Lord could
do no more for His love of the Father by being the Eternal
Word. This was an old glory, because it was in truth an un-
beginning one. Hence it was His grand delight in the Incar-
nation that it furnished Him with a new way of loving and
glorifying the Father. Of course this is not true. It is
untrue, first of all, because of the adorable self-sufficiency of
God, and secondly, because the Eternal Generation is not a
mystery done, but for ever doing, like a pulse of the
Divine Life which as it never began to beat can never cease
beating. Yet this way of putting the matter represents to
us a truth which would otherwise be inexpressible, and
enables us to bring, at least imperfectly, into view an
impression which results from the study of our Lord's
words, read by the light of His Divine Person rather than
by that of His simple Divinity. It serves also to illustrate
our Lord's extreme joy in His Sacred Humanity, in connec-
tion with His peculiar devotion to His Father's glory. It
was not merely falling from a higher fountain to a lower,
nor even adding a lower fountain to a higher. It was the
gaining of another fountain for it, lower indeed, not less
than infinitely lower, but at the same time new.

But are we warranted in saying that devotion to His
Father's glory is a characteristic so observable and so
strongly marked in our Blessed Lord during the Three-
and-Thirty Years t We have said that it amounted to
what in the saints would be called a passion, so vehemently
did it appear to possess His Soul. Let us reconsider the
appearances of it in the Gospels. When we reflect that our
Lord was Himself God, we must feel some surprise that He
should so seldom speak as if He were Himself the original
fountain of truth and the ultimate authority for what He
might vouchsafe to teach. With a few exceptions, He

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER, 455

speaks as one sent, as one under authority, as one who is
delivering another's message. So far as He Himself was
concerned, He claims to be believed rather on account of
His miracles than for His own sake. He expressly says that
He does not bear witness of Himself. On the other hand.
He is constantly referring to the Father. He is continually
magnifying Him who sent Him. His Father's will is all in
all to Him, His Father's glory the end He has not so much
come of His accord, as He has been officially sent, to seek.
Even His own immediate disciples are made to feel, that it
is the Father who is brought so prominently before them,
that He almost eclipses the dignity and authority of our Lord
Himself, which are sedulously put forward rather as borrowed
than as His own. His words to St. Peter, when the apostle
made public confession of His Divinity, show that He
Himself had never explicitly taught His own Divinity
even to those nearest and dearest to Him. It was the Father
who had revealed it to Peter. This then is the first thing we
notice in our Lord's devotion, the constant reference to the
Father as if it was His own habit of mind, and as if He wished
also to make it the habit of mind of those around Him.

Li the next place, as has already been intimated. He
expressly brings forward the will of the Father as His own
rule. It is the religious obedience He is under. It is to
Him both precept and counsel of perfection. His life is in
many respects a strange one, because of its unearthliness.
Its relation to the religious rulers of the nation is outwardly
equivocal. It is a life of homeless wandering, with unfixed
occupations, and duties self-imposed. His movements some-
times wear an appearance of waywardness. He calls others
from the relative duties of their stations in life, as if all
established rules were to give way to the expression of His
cnoice. He works His miracles, sometimes with a secrecy
which hinders their effect as authentications of His mission,

456 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

aometimes in such a way as to give scandal, sometimes undei
such circumstances as to perplex, sometimes with words
which sound untruthful, sometimes with a look of caprice,
and once does He adorably condescend to work a miracle
with a mysterious appearance of human petulance. He
offends the prejudices of the Jews by a certain amount of
intercourse with those outside the synagogue, yet He will
not go so far as to preach His Gospel to them. In certain
matters He takes His stand as a reformer, and disregards
the traditional method of observing some of God's command-
ments. He wilfully forfeits His influence with those for
whose conversion He is labouring, by seeming to transgress
the bounds of discretion in His openly expressed attraction
to sinners. He speaks against the rulers in terms of the
most startling condemnation, yet when pressed to declare
His Divinity He almost eludes the question. How are all
these inconsistencies to be reconciled ? Under what system
of commandments or code of duty is He living 1 His disciples
have been taught by Him to consider that He has an
invisible rule in all He does, a heavenly harmony to which He
times all His adorable and inexplicable movements. It is
His Father's will. That is His religion. He lives in secret
intercourse with the Father. It is not so much that He is
inspired by Him, as that He communes with Him uninter-
ruptedly. Whether He is hiding Himself or showing Him-
self, whether He is among the mountains, in the plain,
upon the lake, or amongst the streets of the city, they feel
that it is the golden thread of His Father's will which He
is following. He does nothing at random, and yet, so it
seems, nothing on any preconcerted system of human pru-
dence. Some one leads Him. He talks with some one by
His side, and it is some one too whose companionship does
not oppress Him. He hints at it, more than hints at it, sa
His Father's will

I

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 457

The doctrine which He puts forward about the Father
is not less remarkable. He will introduce others to some-
thing of the same sort of intimacy with the Father which
He Himself enjoys. This is part of His office. He has
come to communicate the incommunicable Father. He
teaches that the way to the Father is through Him. His
Father's house is the many-mansioned home to which He
has come to invite us. It is the Father who stands behind
His parables, and is the king, and the husbandman, and
the giver of the feast. He goes away, and it is to the
Father He is going. He will prepare a place for those who
love Him, but it is in His Father's house that the place
shall be prepared. Faith in Himself is urged because it
is acceptable to the Father. He will pray to His Father
for those who love Him, and the Father will also grant
to us all we ask, if we ask it in the name of this His
Messenger. When it is good for those around Him, He asks
the Father to glorify Him with some of the old glory which
He enjoyed with Him before. When He comes out of the
waters of Jordan to begin His Ministry, He will have this
grave commencement authenticated by the testimony of the
Father. When it is His will to reach the uttermost limit of
His fearful sufferings, that last excess is to be the dereliction
of His Father ; and what does not this reveal ?

He is Himself infinite Wisdom, and, as the Word, He is
in a specially appropriated sense the wisdom of the God-
head ; yet He seems to speak as if it were not out of His
own abundance, as if it were not the spontaneous outpouring
of His own magnificent intelligence, but as if He were
simply an inspired prophet, as if He were only and pre-
cisely the accredited mouthpiece of the Father. He acts as
the Word of the Father, which indeed He was, yet rather
as if an exalted created Word, than as the consubstantial
Word eternally out-spoken. He calls Himself the Son of

4S8 THE FBBT OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

God, and then purposely wraps the title round with ambiguity
and double meaning, as if He were indeed by special en-
nobling and by singular unction the Son of God, but by no
means the everlasting and coequal Son. As was said before,
when He does assert Himself, when for the sake of others
His love leads Him to magnify Himself, when He overawes
us by the majestic gentleness with which He utters His own
praises, the form it all takes is the declaration of His
oneness with the Father. These are but specimens of the
instances with which the Gospels so abundantly supply us.
When we have received them into our souls, they seem to
form the best part of our most intimate knowledge of our
dearest Lord.

All these instances are taken from His own teaching
during His three years' Ministry. It might be thought, that
in the Infancy there was no scope for the exhibition of a
similar devotion. As He was pleased to observe silence, as
though, like other children, He had to learn to speak, and as
He assumed the disguise of a child's passiveness, and never
laid it aside for a moment, we are left to conjecture the dis-
positions of His Sacred Heart by the aid of theology ; and
the teaching of the Infancy is altogether by example. In
those first years His mysteries were His oracles. Neverthe-
less, if we look at the Childhood attentively, we shall find
most interesting traces of the same position with regard to
the Father, which He openly put forward afterwards in His
express teaching.

The providential arrangements of Bethlehem and Nazareth
look as if they were purposely ordered with this view. It
is as if His Sacred Heart had planned everything with
reference to this branch of His teaching, as if it expressed
more of His Heart than any other. Rather it is not a
branch of His teaching, but His whole teaching, the frame-
work in which all the work of our redemption was accom-

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 455

plished. When we begin to reflect upon the Incarnation we
cannot but be struck with our Lord's condescending to have
a human mother. It appears as if it was the deepest of
His condescensions, and on that account, not only the
sweetest and most delightful for His creatures to contem-
plate, but an actual channel of the most substantial and
exuberant benefits to themselves. If our Lord was to have
a human mother, it must be plain to one who knows the
ways of God, that she must occupy some such place in the
world as that which the Church teaches us God has assigned
to her. Nay, we should expect her place to be higher, more
influential, and in some sense perhaps more independent;
and it is our firm belief, that, hereafter, so it will be found
to be, and that we shall learn in heaven that of a truth
Mary's grandeurs are such as could not safely be taught on
earth because of our infirmities. No province of theology
will have to widen itself so much as that which speaks of
her. In her measures she will be as new to the saints who
have loved her most, as the Vision of Bliss itself will be.
Even on earth the last ages of the Church are to have a
knowledge of her, which would amaze and oppress us now.*
But though an earthly mother formed an essential part of
the Incarnation, He is without earthly Father. He draws
His Human Nature from His Immaculate Mother alone ; but
no created Father may come nigh His eternal filiation, the
glory of which is His exclusively, and He cherishes it with
the utmost jealousy.

This one fact is full of significance in itself. But it be-

• Grignon de Montfort. Vraie Devotion, p. 29. St. Vincent Ferrer
has prophesied the same. In the Mystical City our Lady complains to
Sister Blary of Agreda that most writers about her have been too timid ;
she says that their "reserve" is in reality "indevotion," and assigns
this as the reason of our Lord's having arranged that devotion to her in
the Church should grow in the way of development.— P. iii. 1. viii,
cap. xir.

46o THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER,

comes still more significant when we observe, that, although
He cannot have an earthly father, He immediately places
close to Himself a created shadow of the Eternal Father in
the person of St. Joseph. At least the shadow of the divine
paternity must be there. The Holy Family cannot be the
Earthly Trinity, unless this be so. Bethlehem and Nazareth
cannot be heavens on earth, unless a fountain of meek
government is flowing there, to represent the fountain of
Godhead and Self-sufficiency which flows in heaven. When
He looks around for apt insignia in which at once to shroud
and to symbolise the grand majesty of His Father, He finds
it in the extreme of humble tenderness and bashful gentle-
ness. Where His teaching is to be by example, He is not
content until He has put Himself under the shadow of
obedience to the image of His Father. Thus St. Joseph
furnished Him even with what He could not find in heaven.
Tauler and St. Mary Magdalene of Pazzi are not blamed for
saying that the Word searched heaven for the stole of sufi'er-
ing, and found it not. Yet it was so beautiful in His eyes,
that He could not brook the disappointment, and therefore
took flesh, and came down to enjoy on earth a joy which
heaven denied Him. Devotion will often express itself by
doctrinal allegories of a similar description, nor will the
large heart of severe theology condemn the practice by which
love speaks what is unspeakable, and comes to understand
what was already in herself, but which she did not under-
stand until it found utterance like this. So let us say now
that here was one of St. Joseph's most glorious prerogatives.
He gave our Lord what heaven could not give Him. There
was an impossibility in heaven which Joseph made possible
for Him on earth ; and it was a possibility fraught with a
peculiar joy to the Sacred Heart. St. Joseph enabled Him
to find, in the trinity below, a subordination, of which He
could not find so much as a shadow in the Trinity above.

I

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 461

Not a vestige of subordination could be seen upon Hia
eternal filiation. He was in all things coequal with the
Father. What an intense delight therefore was it now to
His Human Soul to be able to express His love of the
Father by this peculiar devotion, this subordination to His
created shadow and earthly representative !

Moreover, in the days of Bethlehem and Egypt, it was
not He, the Eternal Son, nor was it the Holy Ghost, whose
relation to Mary Joseph symbolised, but it was particularly
the Father, who communicated with Joseph, gave him his
orders, and warned him as he needed it. We know it
is an axiom in theology, that whatever God does outside
Himself is done by the whole Trinity. Yet nevertheless
certain operations are assigned to the different Persons by
an attribution or appropriation, the mystery of which is so
delicate that it can be no otherwise expressed than by such
appropriation. So it most often happens that when God is
mentioned, without the designation of the Divine Person,
we appropriate to the First Person the action in question, as
in the case of the dreams, communications, and warnings of
St. Joseph.

Even the virginity of our Lord's earthly Mother is a kind
of worship of His Heavenly Father, as if to have had a
created father would have dimmed the Father's glory in the
Eternal Generation. Thus did Mary's virginity rise up for
ever in voiceless waves of exquisite incense, or like the fra-
grance of a spice-tree shaken by the wind, before the Pater-
nity on high, an incense of which she herself in silent ecstasy
was ever conscious, and which the Babe watched as it rose
at all hours, gently forcing its way to the distant throne, like
the spiral smoke-wreaths of the sweet gums climbing the
altar to the Blessed Sacrament ; and He watched it with His
Infant eyes with an ineffably tender jubilee. But even
independently of these mysteries, the whole spirit of the

462 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

Sacred Infancy is always taking us by the hand and leading
us softly up to the Eternal Father.

For a child naturally points our thoughts to his parents.
A child is not a child, when we disentangle him from the
idea of his parents. Even orphanhood only brings out the
lost relation the more strongly. This is the reason why the
mysteries of the Infancy give out so much indirect devotion
to Mary, so much more than the other divisions of our Lord's
life, not even excepting the Mary-haunted Calvary. Rightly
therefore and more deeply considered, they do the same, and
in a much higher degree, to the Eternal Father. Indeed
there is a point of view in prayer, from which devotion to
Him and devotion to Mary blend with heavenly confusion
into one. It passes, and is gone. It was but for a moment.
Only we saw it, and were sure of it, and what it left in the
soul we never shall forget.

But we must venture into details, trying the depth of the
water as we go. We must endeavour to bring before our-
selves several manifestations of this devotion to the Eternal
Father, proceeding from the greater to the less, until it shall
die away into a devotion possible even to our extreme little-
ness and lowness.

We have already considered our Lord's devotion to the
Father, as it is implied in the mysteries of the Infancy, and
as it is taught in the doctrine of the Gospels. But we may
also regard it in an historical, or rather biographical point of
view, as distinguishing in a remarkable manner our Lord's
own life. Suarez, in this respect differing from St. Thomas,
thinks it most probable that our Lord, at the first moment
of the Incarnation, made a vow to give Himself up to the
Father to redeem the world by His death ; and that the per-
fection of this vow involved every one of His actions in
detail, so that, not only were all His actions in point of fact
always directed with an actual intention to the glory of the

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 463

Father, but He had made away His human liberty from the
first, as far as a vow implies such a surrender, and that all
His actions were therefore so directed by vow. Here is
another instance of a fresh point of view from which the
Gospels may be read, whatever becomes of the controversy
among theologians as to the likelihood or unlikelihood of such
a vow. Vowed or unvowed, it is most certain, as the com-
bined thought of His science and His grace assures us, that
every one of the minutest actions of His Childhood, His
sleeping, waking, weeping, smiling, taking the breast, being
dressed, undressed, or washed, distinctly each time was done,
with the full use of reason and under the sovereignty of
grace, for the Father's glory. Thus the Sacred Infancy was
a continuous function, celebrated in the temple of that bliss-
ful Humanity, in honour of the Eternal Father. Priest, and
sacrifice, and sacrificial vestments, and bells, and incense, and
flowers, and angelic ministers, all were there, and the august
solemnity knew no interruptions, the ceremonial ever chang-
ing, the function never ceasing. It ranged from one beauty
to another, from one splendour to another, from one mystery
to another, and yet was all harmoniously one. It could shift
the scene from Bethlehem to the Desert, from Egypt to
Nazareth, but there were no pauses in that magnificent wor-
ship of the Father. Who can say, why, when His Human
Soul loved the Holy Ghost so amazingly. He put forward His
Father's glory with such an impressive emphasis?

If we look at the still night in the dark room at Nazareth
and the desolate afternoon on Calvary, it is this devotion to
the Father which brings them together and clasps them into
one. His very beginning, whether it was vow or not, we
know from the Apostle was. Behold I come to do Thy will.
It was that He might do this will that a Body had been
prepared for Him, and therefore it was as soon as He came
into the world that He aaid, Behold I come ! In the head

464 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

of the book it is written of Me, that I should do Thy will;
0 God ! When He goes out of the world it is, Father 1 into
Thy hands I commend My spirit. As the beginning was, so
was the ending. He rose out of one sea of the Father's
will, like the sun of a peninsula, and He sank into another
sea; the Three-and-Thirty Years was the narrow strip of
earth which He illuminated in His course. Then what
came between the rising and the setting ? His perseverance.
His perseverance in a life of humiliation, sorrow, and suffer-
ing, His perseverance in the same solemn worship of His
Father's glory which had occupied His Infancy, only now
the music was yet graver, the ceremonies more numerous,
the pageant more austere. Moreover how does He express
His perseverance 1 My meat is to do the will of Him who
sent Me.

If we might detach one portion of His life, and isolate it,
as sufficiently indicating the great work which He came to
do, it would obviously be the Passion. Our belief that He
would still have been incarnate, supposing man had not fallen,
no doubt affects even our view of the Passion, and makes our
eyes keen to observe its character of reparation as well as its
accomplishment of redemption. "We more naturally, or at
least with greater facility, look at each mystery as primarily
intended to glorify the Father rather than to redeem sinners,
or, to speak more strictly, we look at it as redeeming sinners
by making reparation to the glory of the Father. The
primary end of a glorious Incarnation would have been to
glorify God by exceeding love of man. After the fall the
glorifying of God assumed a deeper and more uniform
character of reparation, deeper and more uniform, rather than
new, — for may we not say, when God's all-holy majesty is so
spotless, that even for an unfallen world something like
reparation would have been required ? The Passion is the
miraculous piling up, on one sensitive human life, of all woes

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 465

of soul and all torments of flesh, one upon another until
they culminate. Surely then there is great significance in
the fact that His Passion culminated in His being abandoned
by the Father. Could any further anguish lie beyond the
confines of that appalling dereliction, or had it actually ex-
hausted the possibilities of suffering 1 We may never limit
the omnipotence of God. But we may say that such an aban-
donment did positively exhaust all the possibilities of suffering.
Nothing now was left but death. In the grandeur of His
unspeakable grace. His Soul held on, as if within finite length
of arm, to the Father who so awfully withdrew : and His last
words were, Father ! into Thy hands I commend My spirit.

Each Christmas, as it comes, brings back to us old charms,
familiar joys because they have been joys from childhood.
One of these is the power of Mary over Jesus. Who does
not remember the astonishment of his early years, when he
had come to appreciate the meaning of our Lord being God,
and yet in pictures and in Christmas mysteries saw Mary
make free with Him as if He were a common child ? Was
He really as helpless as He seemed, or was He only feigning
helplessness ? Neither ; yet He lay on Mary's lap Hke any
other babe, and after all. He was God. Then for the first
time we felt an awe of Mary, because we seemed to see her
more nearly and more truly. New thoughts struck us. We
had, so it appeared, discovered something for ourselves
beyond what we had ever been told ; and it is always true
that what we learn of ourselves goes deeper into us than
what others teach us. Thus the mysteries of the Infancy
opened out before us, and we read them all in the single
light of His visible obedience to Mary. From the night
when she showed Him to the shepherds, to the day when He
seemed to adjourn His Father's business and went back with
her to Nazareth for eighteen years, and again when, at the
outset of His ministry, He began it with anticipating His

2 Q

466 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

time for working miracles, that He might still obey her, all
seemed plain in that single light of His filial obedience,
Nothing was left uninterpreted. It was a scene of heavenly
wonders, but all was harmonious, and one spirit brooded
over it all. Even over the Childhood of the Everlasting
God Mary's maternal jurisdiction lay outspread like a golden
glory. Were other thoughts, were fresh discoveries, to break
up this vision, as the wind breaks up the visionary landscapes
in the still water? Never. Fresh discoveries would be
made. Unsuspected invisible things would be seen behind,
would be seen through that glory ; yet only to make it yet
more glorious. Our youth's dream of the Mary-governed
Infancy was never to pass away. For, as with most of our
childish apprehensions of truth, the matter had been most
truly apprehended, and in the truest way. Years have
gone on, and with the years the heart has gone on also
making many discoveries by that light of Mary. Age will
not have done discovering ; and then heaven will meet us
with its last discovery, which will neither dishonour those
which have gone before, nor eclipse the light in which they
have been made. But what is it which this light of Mary's
maternal jurisdiction shows us now 1 Another jurisdiction
which lies beneath, another obedience which stands behind,
supporting, ennobling, glorifying Mary's power. It is His
sovereign obedience to the Eternal Father : and once, by the
darkest mystery in the Gospel, for the still further exulta-
tion of His Mother, and for other divine reasons, the two
obediences are allowed, not truly to come in conflict, but to
seem to do so ; as when without her leave and to her intense
anguish He stayed behind in the temple when He was twelve
years old. The hand of the Eternal Father seems to put
aside the cloud of light, and let in the dazzling brightness of
deep heaven upon us, and for the moment Mary's light is
darkened, not so much darkened in itself, as darkened to the

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 467

weakness of our sight, thus suddenly overpowered from on
high.

We must observe also that double action of the Father
and the Son, in consequence of which no man comes to the
Father but by the Son, while on the other hand no one truly
knows the Son except the Father teach him. It is as if it
was the Father's will that Jesus should not bear witness of
Himself, in order that He, the Father, might reserve to Him-
self the joy of bearing witness of the Son, as He did over
the river Jordan, and again when the heavenly Voice spoke
of glorifying Him. He would magnify the Son as the Son
was ever delighting to magnify Him. There should be
something reciprocal even in the manner of the love which
the Father bore to the Sacred Humanity. The grand instance
of this, to which we shall have to refer again, was His secretly
revealing to Peter the doctrine of our Blessed Lord's Divinity.
Flesh and blood, said Jesus, have not revealed it to thee,
but My Father who is in heaven. This secret revelation of
the Eternal Father to St. Peter is one of the most striking
incidents recorded in the Gospels, and fascinates our atten-
tion, as well by its singularity, as by the depths of contem-
plation which it opens out to us. If it be not irreverent so
to speak, we might compare it with those facts in biographies,
which are sometimes recorded as single incidents, to which
no prominence is given, and on which no stress is laid, yet
which nevertheless flash upon us as each of them the key-
stone of a whole biography.

There is one more event in our Lord's life, which must
be dwelt upon. Yet we dwell on it with reluctance, as it is
impossible to do justice either to its tenderness or to its
mystery. Every one has something of his religion in his
heart, which it is hard for him to put into words, just
because it has grown so familiar in his thoughts, that it
never assumes there the vesture of words, and we almost

468 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

fear to desecrate it by clothing it in speech. Such to us is
the event in question, of which we are going to speak : such
has it been to us so far back as our memory can go. It
dawns upon us in the Gospels that our Lord must have
made the Person of the Father the subject of frequent con-
versation with His apostles. We are inclined to think He
must have spoken most intimately, and perhaps minutely,
with them on this attractive subject. He may probably have
communicated to them more wonders regarding the Paternity
of God than even our rich theology has taught us. Such a
subject would be a natural one for Him to dwell upon,
because it was that which was most in His Heart, and He
Himself has said that out of the abundance of the heart the
mouth speaketh. Moreover He so openly put forward His
devotion to the Father, that it would be likely for Him in
His secret teaching to fill in the outline which He had
given more openly.

There seems no improbability in this consideration, when
it is suggested to us. But what is there which actually
intimates it to us? Surely if much had not gone before,
which is not recorded in the Gospels, St. Philip never could
have said, Lord ! show us the Father, and it is enough for
us. Most beautiful words ! The pathetic utterance of all
creation allowed to articulate itself in the voice of that dear
apostle ! On the first reading how beautiful were the words,
and now when read, when pondered, when whispered to
ourselves, when breathed to the same Lord in prayer, how
*housand-fold more beautiful ! Lord ! show us the Father,
and it is enough for us ! Yes ! Enough — that gentle, un-
constrained, most truthful word, Enough, — precisely what
creation pines for, precisely what will bring that contentment
which flows from the filling of our natures and the satisfac-
tion of our holiest desires ! Enough ! saints and angels,
Joseph and Mary, they alone could tell us of that Enough.

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 469

We must tear ourselves away from those little words, each
of which has so great a soul, so large a heart within it.
We must turn to observe our Saviour's answer to Philip, an
answer with what a look of love assuredly accompanied !
He is not so much surprised that the apostle should have
received thus deeply into his soul what He had taught him
about the Father, as surprised that his knowledge had not
led him further. Here again we have indications of a world
of secret teaching. So long a time have I been with you,
and have you not known Me 1 Philip ! he that seeth Me
seeth the Father also. How sayest thou, Show us the
Father? Believe you not that I am in the Father, and the
Father in Me ? Otherwise believe for the very work's sake.
Amen, Amen, I say to you, he that believeth in Me, the
works that I do, he also shall do, and greater than these
shall he do, because I go to the Father. And whatsoever
you shall ask the Father in My Name, that will I do, tJiat
the Father may be glorified in the Son. His oneness with
the Father is dearer to Him than His distinctness. Won-
derful ! for He was the express image of the Father, the
brightness of His glory, and the figure of His substance.

Thus they who were nearest to our Blessed Lord, and
whose souls were nurtured on His secret teaching, may be
described as men who pined to see the Father, who were
discontented with all things else, who did not rest even in
the presence of the Son, but whose wants were measured
exactly by the Vision of the Father. It would be enough.
But there would be no enough short of that, no enough else-
where, no enough till then. Ages have passed since, and
Jesus is leading His royal life in heaven. But is He changed
in this respect ? Ages perhaps, — it is sad to think, yet surely
not an unwise humility so to think, for there is not a grain
of despondency in the thought, — ages perhaps may pass
amidst the cleansing fires before the divine mercy shall bid

470 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

St. Michael lift us out of the burning sea and place us on
the coasts of heaven. Will Jesus have changed by that time
in this respect ? No ! strangely in unison with the spirit of
the Three-and-Thirty Years will His greeting be, and expres-
sive of the same, not unforgotten only, but unbroken thought,
Come, blessed of My Father ! Blessed of My Father ! that
is our eternal name, the name giving us in our first baptism
of heavenly beatitude. Blessed of My Father ! How those
words come to us in the tingling stillness of the night, when
panic fears oppress our loneliness, and so strangely vex our
souls ! How they rise soft and clear above the rolling of the
world, in hours of weariness, and of obstinate temptations
which grace seems at times to multiply rather than repel.
How they sing songs to the fear of death, and lull it when
it wakes and cries ! Blessed of My Father ! Why Blessed
of My Father 1 Do the words lead on to that date at which
He shall deliver up the kingdom to God and the Father, and
the Son Himself be subject unto Him that put all things
under Him that God may be all in all ? For, says the apostle,
when all things are put under Jesus, He is undoubtedly
excepted who put all things under Him ; and who is He but
the Eternal Father ? But we are reaching into the darkness
of unapproachable mysteries. Enough for us, it was Philip's
chosen word, enough if only we be blessed of the Father.

We are now, in tracing still further this special devotion
to the Father, brought again to that frequently recurring
difficulty of speaking of our Blessed Lady without doing
despite to our own conceptions of her. We must consider
her devotion to the Eternal Father, and how in her also it
was special. But when we have seen what it was in the
Soul of Jesus, we can understand what it was in hers.
According to the proportions of her inferiority it was the
same besetting thought, the same holy possession of soul, the
aame solitary and sacred enthusiasm which it was in Hia

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 471

But there were circumstances in her position and influence
which gave a peculiar character to this devotion in her, and
these we must examine. She was the sole earthly parent of
Jesus. In herself she enjoyed the rights both of father and
of mother. This was one of the miraculous glories of her
Maternity, a subject to her of frequent meditation and of
incessant joy. It was not only that her own honour was as
it were doubled thereby ; but the glory of God was concerned
in it. It was for the honour of Jesus. It was for the
honour of the Eternal Father. The Incarnation would have
been quite a diflferent mystery if it had been otherwise ; and
therefore we may believe that some of its especially divine
splendour was involved in this very fact of Mary's being His
sole earthly parent. She felt therefore that this peculiarity
in her position reflected peculiar honour upon the Eternal
Father, and therefore was a ground of devotion to Him^
which, while all could feel it, belonged eminently to herself.
Moreover the same fact would cause her thoughts to be con-
tinually resting on her Son's Heavenly Father. The mother's
love of her child is always entwined with thoughts of its
father, and with continual reference to him. A widowed
mother has a double love of hor child, because she loves him
for her husband's sake as well as for her own. Conjugal
aff'ection is an element which can never be absent from the
perfection of maternal love.

Now in Mary's case there were heavenly peculiarities in
every one of these circumstances. Her love of Jesus was
necessarily entwined with thoughts of His Father ; but He
was God, and the First Person of the Holy Trinity. She
had nothing to do with the Eternal Generation of the Son,
except to be a portion of the shadow of it. She also was in
a certain sense widowed, and St. Joseph did but veil her
widowhood. Yet she had not to love two in one. She had
not to love the lost Father in the Child, as well as the Child

472 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

Himself. She had to love her Child doubly, to love Him
as being both His Father and His Mother, and to love Him
thus doubly for His own sake alone. What conjugal affec-
tion does in the maternal love of others, adoration had to do
in hers, a double adoration both of the invisible Father and
of the visible Son. Furthermore, her Maternity was part of
her religion. It occupied a great space in her faith. It was
linked with some of the most inscrutable mysteries of the
Godhead. It never could be out of her thoughts for a
moment, even without any reference to her own delight in
it, because it was the created echo of the uncreated Genera-
tion of the Word. The result of all these things was, not
only that the interior of her mind belonged so singularly to
herself that it could not be shared, nor even fully appre-
hended, by any other creature, but that the unity into which
it resolved itself was, as consideration shows us, devotion to
the Eternal Father. All the circumstances rose upward to
His throne. They were like flights of steps from the north
and the south, from the east and the west, but all ascending
to that single throne. It takes long to master these things
in all their bearings, even so far as we are able to master
them, but can time be better spent than in elucidating the
grandeurs of Mary ? We remember that text of Scripture
which the Church applies to her ; — They, who elucidate me,
shall have eternal life.

We must consider also that one of the prerogatives of
Mary's singular holiness was that she could enter more than
any other mere creature into the inward dispositions of God.
The mind of God was more open to her. The affections of
God were more intimately communicated to her. She saw
the Father's exceeding love of Jesus more clearly than any
»7ondering angel sees it now. She saw down into its pellucid
depths, and worshipped in the thankfulness of profoundest
fear. The vision of this love of the Father for Jesus doubt-

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 473

less excited in her heart a new love of Jesus. It was a new
pattern for her to copy. It was another proof to her, that
even she did not love Jesus as He deserved. It was a fresh
incentive to her to dilate her heart more and more. It was
a substantial and efficacious fire which actually effected the
dilatation of her heart for her. It was the Father's love.
But He did not keep it to Himself. He communicated to
her so much of it as she could bear, and benignantly made it
hers as well as His. But while it was in her a new light by
which to see and appreciate Jesus, and at the same time a
new power to love Him, it also, because of her own immense
love of Jesus, produced in her heart a new love of the Father.
She loved Him the more because He so loved the Son. She
loved Him for so far overshooting her own maternal love.
She loved Him because He loved Jesus to the full, and left
nothing wanting in the perfection of His love. She loved
Him, because His love at once took her office out of her own
hands, and at the same time enabled her to fulfil it as she
could not otherwise have done. She loved Him because His
love was a revelation of Jesus, and a revelation made in so
touchingly maternal a manner. It was the confidence of the
Heavenly Father to the Earthly Mother, confiding to her in
secret the real worth, and character, and dearness of Him
who was the Child of both in two such mysterious ways.
Thus she ventured on this account to love the Father with a
sort of timid exultation, as if she had a kind of right to
share in the Father's peculiar parental love of Jesus. It is
impossible for us to realise the depths of profoundest adora-
tion into which Mary's soul must have been cast by this
awful communication with the Father in that which is His
own eternal singularity, in that which actually makes Him
to be the Father and is the fountain of His Paternity, in
that which would have seemed to all creatures to be in any
measure or degree absolutely incommunicable. See how for

474 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

the moment Mary and the Eternal Father blend uncom-
minglingly in one ! In many lights the Mother of God is
worshipful in her dread majesty ; in none does she so com-
pletely strike us dumb before her majesty as in this.

Her own similitude to Jesus would naturally involve her
having caught from Him this the master-devotion of His
Sacred Heart, to which she knew, and rejoiced it should be
so, that even His love of her was utterly subordinate. But
these other peculiar circumstances of her own gave her de-
votion to the Eternal Father a character and distinctness,
which make it something more than a copy of our Lord's
reduced to the lesser dimensions of her heart. But hei
communication with the Father in His Paternity, out ol
which flows a special love both of Him and of the Son, is
not her only fountain of devotion to Him, nor the only
mystery which seems to draw her from her visible vicinity
to God into the blinding splendours of the very Throne. A?
she shares in the Father's Paternity, so also she shares in the
Son's Filiation. She was herself in a special way, through
predestination and because of the Infant Jesus, the eternal
daughter of the Father.

Here too was a fresh source of the love of Jesus, a beauti-
ful strange love from the mingling of the mother and the
sister in one heart ; it was a different tie to Him from the
direct tie of the Incarnation, though even this new tie came
from the selfsame mystery. Here also was a look, a shadow,
a fair umbrage, it could not be more, yet how much was
even this 1 of dear equality with Jesus, dearer far than the
apparent superiority over Him, which her maternal juris-
diction conferred upon her. Here also was another fountain
of love of the Eternal Father, another marvellous founda-
tion on which the temple of her devotion to Him might be
raised. Her grandeurs dazzle us. But it is not so much the
glory of them which we are to look at now, as the wonderful

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 475

intricate simplicity with which they all converge upon her
devotion to the Eternal Father.

Now let us advance a step further in the history of this
devotion. When we first entered upon our enquiry into the
mysteries of Bethlehem, we compared the Sacred Infancy to
a forest, and St. Joseph to its odorous under-growth, whose
fragrance would be to us, whichever way we bent our steps,
like the atmosphere of the place. So has it been throughout;
and now, when we come to speak of his devotion to the
Eternal Father, we shall have to repeat many things which
have been said before, or which at least have been treated
from a different point of view. But repetition about him
is hardly wearisome. It is plain at first sight that devotion
to the Eternal Father must have been the length and breadth
of his whole sanctity. It was the characteristic, from which
his holiness derived its genius and its unity. His dread
office of being the shadow of the Father could not import
less than this. His loving care of Mary came out of it, and
was included within it. He was the shadow of the Father
to her as well as to Jesus. His tender ministries to our
Blessed Lord, and the exercise of authority with which he
worshipped Him, a worship solitary among all the worships
that surround the Word, — all came out of his office. Indeed
it was to Jesus primarily that Joseph was the Shadow of
the Father. It might even be said that to himself also he
was the shadow of the Father ; for in that shadow his soul
grew, and his predestination was accomplished. It was a
deep, soft, beautifying, soothing shade over his life perpetu-
ally. It was his light. He saw, and worked, by the light
of that shadow.

Moreover it was his form of love of Jesus. For as he
had to imitate the office of the Eternal Father, so likewise
did he imitate His love. There was something more truly
paternal in his tenderness to our Lord than the tenderness

476 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

di common earthly fathers, because, though he was not a
true father, his office came out of a deeper Paternity. Divine
shadows are substantial. They are shadows in relation to
the eternal height which casts them, but they lie defined,
substantial, and transfiguring, on created things. We must
remind ourselves of this, although we have indicated the
same truth before. This communication of the Divine
Paternity was Joseph's highest right to love Jesus. He
might love Him as His creature. He might love Him as
one of His redeemed. He might love Him with a personal
love, as having been laden with gifts and graces by Him.
He might love Him as Mary's Child, with a love into which
he might throw all the intensity of his love of Mary. He
might love Him for His own sake, because He was so winning,
and attractive, and encompassed with divine fascinationa
He might love Him as we come to love all whom we have
saved from death or danger, or who have permitted us to
show them kindness ; and this love would be in proportion
to the dignity of his own office, and the excellence of his
Foster-child. But his highest love of Him was from his
highest right to love Him, and that resided in his being the
shadow of the Father. He loved Jesus in and by his love
of the Eternal Father, and by the likeness to the Father
which the Eternal Father had communicated to him, whereby
he was raised to the further and inexpressible dignity of
likeness to the Son Himself, who was also the image of the
Father. Thus it is that the loves of the Earthly Trinity are
illuminated by quivering beams, by shooting splendours, by
pulses of throbbing light, which seem to belong rather to the
inward life of the Heavenly Trinity, adorably communicated
to that sweetest growth of all creation, the Holy Family.

Joseph's devotion to the Eternal Father was also his form
of love of Mary. He was especially her husband as the
foster-father of Jesus. His conjugal office was simply part of

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 477

his shadow of the Father. His office to her rose out of the
same source as his office to Jesus, namely, out of the same
shadow. As with Jesus, so with Mary, he might love her for
many reasons, and with various pure and holy loves. As his
spouse, as the Mother of Jesus, as the spouse of the Holy
Ghost, as the daughter of the Father, for her love of Jesus,
for her love of himself, for her own transcending excellence,
— for all these things he might love her, and did love her, as
only so holy a heart could love. But his love of her, inas-
much as he was the shadow of the Father, was a wider love
than any or all of these, and rested upon a yet more divine
appointment. Indeed it did in matter of fact presuppose and
include all those other loves. Thus his devotion to the
Father sank into all the details of his life, by the necessity
of the case. It was his vocation, the end for which he was
created, the reason of his immense grace on earth, the expla-
nation of his stupendous glory in heavea "We may thus see
how true the doctrine was with which we started, that his
whole spiritual life, that peculiar sanctity which he shares
with no other saint, was built upon, and resolves itself into,
a most incomparably special devotion to the Eternal Father.
St. Joseph's name expresses to our thoughts the shadow of
the Father, and the name of the shadow of the Father leaves
nothing about St. Joseph unexpressed.

The Apostles were a body of men unlike the rest of the
saints, both in the greatness of their gifts, the magnitude
of their office, and the special relation in which they stood
to our Blessed Lord. We may not liken the other saints to
them, much less exalt any of them above the Apostles of the
Word. Theologians teach us that we should incur the note
of temerity if we did so. The litanies of the Church seem
to warrant us in excepting St. Joseph and St. John the
Baptist There are some of the Apostles, of whom we know
nothing but their names as enumerated in the Gospel, o?

478 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

some uncertain traditions of the localities of their preaching.
Yet the choice of Jesus has put a golden crown upon their
heads, which is an index to us, not only of their rank, but
also of the sublimity of their holiness. We cannot doubt
that the peculiarity of their office betokens a corresponding
peculiarity in their grace. We look upon them with awe,
and yet at the same time with a very familiar love. We see
them always by the side of Jesus, and there they look so
little, that we hardly estimate their proportions justly. We
see them also in the very process of being made the great
saints they were, and their infirmities endear them to us
without degrading them. We are told little of them as
saints. We only or chiefly know them as novices ; and even
so how wonderful they look, how wonderful, and yet how
human too ! Hence it is that devotion to the Apostles is a
very affectionate devotion,* of the same kind, though far
higher in degree, as that which we feel to the patriarchs of
the Old Testament. When the Church desires especially to
honour a saint, it calls him, though in a lower sense, an
apostle, as it called St. Philip Neri the apostle of Rome.

But their peculiar office and peculiar grace imply also a
peculiar devotion ; and we cannot but believe that devotion
to the Eternal Father was their special and characteristic
devotion. They were brought up in the school of Jesus.
He Himself was their master. The spirit of Jesus was their
spirit. They were formed upon it. It rested upon them.
It transformed them at last into itself. When they went
forth to preach, it was the living spirit of Jesus which from
the narrow confines of Judaea broke forth and inundated the
whole heathen world. But we have seen that the spirit of

* Thus Palafox, who was noted for his Old Testament devotions, says
that his devotion to the Apostles was "mas sensitive " than any of his
Old Testament devotions, except that to Adam and Eve, which was a
devotion of "gran ternura," extreme tenderness. Vida Interior, cap,
xlviii

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 479

Jesus was a special devotion to the Eternal Father. His
spirit was the energy of that uncreated Spirit, whose change
of our hearts is shown by the cry of Abba, Father. Who
can doubt then that a special devotion to the Father was
also the characteristic devotion of the Apostles 1 We may
legitimately infer it from our Lord's teaching, which we have
already considered, from their special and privileged know-
ledge of Jesus, as His Apostles, which knowledge the Father
alone could teach them, and also from the fact that imitation
of their Master was the distinctive genius of the members
of the apostolic college.

But instances of individual Apostles will supply us with
something more than inferences. In the case of St. Peter
we have the Eternal Father acting in an apparent indepen-
dence of Jesus, and as we should say, except for the science
of our Lord, without His privity, and becoming in secret St.
Peter's master in the theology of our Lord's Divinity. St.
Peter's magnificence is so broad, that what seem single inci-
dents are lost and confounded in the whole. But, supposing
such an event to have happened to any of the greatest saints,
should we not have considered it tantamount to his whole
life, to his whole vocation, to his whole sanctity ] It would
have coloured everything about him. It would have been
the master-fact of his life, taking up to itself, and calling
round it, and subordinating, all other facts. We should
seem to have expressed ourselves feebly, if we had merely
said that henceforth devotion to the First Person of the
Holy Trinity had become his special devotion.

In the case of St. John, his Gospel furnishes us with
indirect testimony of this special devotion, particularly in
the conversations which he selects, doubtless under Mary's
guidance, to record; for, in inspiration, the Holy Ghost
animates and presides over the natural bias of the writer,
rather than supplants or supersedes it. But, above all, his

48o THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

devotion to the Eternal Generation of our Lord is in itself
most ample proof of his devotion to the Father, because the
mystery in question is inseparably linked with it. In his
epistles it is gleaming out perpetually, like the light through
the chinks of a secret chamber. He calls Jesus the life
eternal which was with the Father. He declares Jesus to
us, that we may have fellowship with the Father. He
writes unto the babes, because they have known the Father.
His consolation, if we sin, is that we have an advocate with
the Father. He says if we love the world, the charity of
the Father is not in us, and that the pride of life is not of
the Father. Anti-Christ is he who denies the Father and
the Son ; and the horror of denying the Son is that then we
have not the Father, while he, who confesses the Son, has
the Father also, and we are to abide in the Son and in the
Father. That we should be the sons of God is the manner
of charity which the Father hath bestowed upon us. We
are to walk in the truth, he tells the elect lady, as we have
received a commandment from the Father, and that he, who
continues in the doctrine, the same hath both the Father
and the Son.

St Philip's devotion to the Father is revealed in his speech
to our Lord, which we have already commented on at length,
but which we must not omit to remember in the present
connection. It is perhaps the most striking, as it is certainly
the most touching, of all the instances of this apostolic devo
tion. It has certainly been enough to give to many of us an
intense personal devotion to this dear Apostle himself.

The same devotion is quite one of the most distinguishing
characteristics of Si Paul. He names the Eternal Father
forty times in his different epistles, and sometimes seems to
go out of his way to do it. He repeatedly blesses Him in
outbursts of the love of praise and of congratulation. Except
the one to the Hebrews, he begins all his epistles with th«

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 481

formula, Grace to you, and peace from God the Father, and
from our Lord Jesus Christ. In the beginning of the first
epistle to the Thessalonians he merely says, Grace be to you
and peace, but in the next verse speaks of their enduring in
the hope of our Lord Jesus Christ before God and our
Father. In the two epistles to St. Timothy he slightly but
touchingly varies the formula, adding mercy between grace
and peace : and in the conclusion of the epistle to the
Hebrews he alludes to the Father and to the peace of the
Father, when he implores a blessing on them from the God
of peace, who brought again from the dead the great pastor
of the sheep, our Lord Jesus Christ, in the blood of the ever-
lasting testament Indeed the practice of some holy men of
making genuflections * many times a day in honour of the
Eternal Father, was based upon that passage of St. Paul in
the third chapter to the Ephesians : For this cause I bow my
knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all
paternity in heaven and earth is named.

These are the indications of this apostolic devotion, which
have been allowed to transpire. Who will not see that they
are indications of much more which has been hidden from
us, and also that what is left us is enough? The great
hearts of the apostolic college were moulded by the chosen
devotion of the Sacred Heart, devotion to the Eternal
Father.

The First Person of the Holy Trinity is the Father of the
Angels as well as our Father, although He is our Father in
an additional sense because of His Son having assumed our
nature. Were we sufficiently instructed in the bright wor-
ships of those glorious eldest-bom of God, we might doubt-
less trace some devotion amongst them analagous to this of
ours. Their amazing science of the Holy Trinity will fur-
nish them with intelligent varieties of praise and congratula-

* Bm Bftnj'f JkxaM S«iAct«, tii9 ibd«x to th« dsTotions.

2 H

482 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

tion to the Divine Persons, which surpass onr skill ani
comprehension. There is reason to believe that one
whole choir of the Angels, that of the Thrones, is in some
special manner devoted to the worship and science of the
Father.

The world of the Saints supplies us also with instances of
this devotion. But we must remember that there is much
which lies too deep for instances. Devotion to the Father
is the groundwork of a vast amount of peculiar sanctity, which
never reveals on its surface the nature of the ground beneath.
It is moreover just the devotion to keep itself secret and
invisible, the more so as the instruments on which it makes
its music are the mysteries of the Sacred Humanity. It will
almost always be found that any soul, which is remarkable
for a more than common devotion to the Sacred Humanity,
will also be distinguished by a more silent and deeper-seated,
yet not the less intense, devotion to the Eternal Father.
The same may be said of those who have a special devotion
to St. Joseph. The school of French piety in the seventeenth
century, of which we may take as the representative Father
Condren, the General of Cardinal Berulle's Oratorians,
moulded itself on the spirit of Jesus, with a view to the
revival of the ecclesiastical spirit, and, as might have been
expected, the writings and lives of its members are full of
indications of a special devotion to the Father. Among the
canonised Saints we find St. Aloysius keeping every Monday
holy in honour of the Eternal Father. St. Mechtildis was
told by our Lord to adopt as a peculiar devotion the offering
of His praises to the Eternal Father. St. Lutgarde was in-
structed by Him to address especially to the Eternal Father
her prayers for those in mortal sin. Nouet, in his preface
to his Conduct of Souls, tells us that the Jesuit, Father
Ferdinand Monroy, used to go about the house exclaiming,
Ardenter diligamus Patrem iEternum. Let us ardently love

THE FEET OP THE ETERNAL FATHER. 483

the Eternal Father. Of all the modern Saints St. Ignatius
appears to be the most distinguished by a special devotion
to the Eternal Father. The inspiration to found his order
came in some special way from the Father, and was the
Father's gift to the Son. The whole history of it reminds
us of the Father's revelation to St Peter in the Gospel.
The wonderful fragments of St. Ignatius' journal, given in
Bartoli's life of him, also contain some interesting traces
of this dominant devotion of the saint. Doubtless a little
reference to the lives of the Saints would enable us to
multiply these instances. But this is enough for our pur-
pose. "We have traced the devotion down from our Blessed
Lord, through His Mother, St. Joseph, the Apostles, and
the Saints, not without a suspicion of it among the Angels,
and we have landed ourselves amid simple practices, which
are not above the attainments of the lowest of us.

But something should be said of the grounds of this devo-
tion, what it rests upon, what it involves, and what spirit
it brings along with it. It is based on the distinct Person of
the Father. It is He who without precedence is the First
of the Holy Trinity, He who is the fountain of Godhead to
the Son, and also, with the Son, to the Holy Ghost, He who
is Unbegotten, He who alone of all the Three cannot be sent
on any mission. He who is the chief symbol to us of the
invisibility of the Godhead, He who is every moment beget-
ting His Eternal Son, He from whom with the Son the Holy
Ghost is every moment eternally proceeding. He who is
clothed in the mantle of all paternities, like the splendour of
shot gold wherein are curiously, inextricably wrought the
fatherhoods of heaven with the fatherhoods of earth. It is
He, it is His distinct Person, who is the base of our devotion,
the object of our adoring love, a love specially expressed by
this devotion. What He is to us His creatures, as our
Father, flows from His Person. As He is the fountain of

484 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER,

Godhead to the Son and the Holy Ghost, so is He in a pre-
eminent sense the fountain of creation, redemption, and
sanctification to us. He is to us, and here opens a wide,
indeed an illimitable, field for our devotion, the Giver and
Sender of our Lord Jesus Christ. It was He who so loved
the world that He gave His only-begotten Son to die for our
sins. It is He who to our jubilee has constituted Himself
the teacher of the grandeurs of Jesus to all of us. It is He
who has made the road to Himself to be through Jesus, the
pleasantest of homeward-leading paths. It is He who will
cast out none who come to Him by Jesus. It is He who is
Himself the grand highway to Jesua It is He who gave
Mary and Joseph the gifts which made them what they are,
and then gave Mary and Joseph to us. It is He who gave
the kingdom to Jesus, and will one day receive it back from
Him, so that God may be all in all, and the kingdom of
Jesus not one of time but of eternity. It is He who is one
with the Son and the Holy Ghost, and will come with Them
into our souls, and make His mansion there. It is He who,
having been our Father in His love from all past eternity,
will be our Father in His glory for all the eternity to come.
These are the grounds which His ever-blessed Person fur-
nishes for our devotion.

The sweet relationship of His Paternity to us is not so
much another ground of our devotion, as another way of look-
ing at it But the consideration of it is of vital importance.
There is something especially reliable or trustworthy in
paternal love. Other love may seem more quickly excited,
or more outwardly demonstrative, or less chequered with
shades of austerity, or less chastened with fear, or less sparing
in its words. But there is something ultimate in a father's
love, something that cannot fail, something to be believed
against the whole world. We almost attribute practical
omnipotence to our father m the days of our childhood.

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 485

There is always against everybody an appeal to him, whose
judgment is infallible, whose decision is certain to be on our
side, and who has means of his own to execute his sentences
irresistibly. Fire will not bum us, if he is near. The
thunderbolts must turn aside, when they see him. The high
winds can only rock us to sleep, the rough seas are only
laughing at us, and we can have them punished when we
will. Nightly terrors disappear in his arms, and even ghosts
from the land of death dare not pursue us there. A mother's
love, dear as it is, is not a thing like this. This love is a
picture of our affectionate dependence on our Heavenly
Father ; for with Him we are always children, not on this
side of the grave only, but on the other also. Heaven is
eternal childhood in the mansion of our Father. Many chil-
dren, who fear their fathers, will yet take liberties with them
which they will not take with their mothers. Their very
fears lean upon their father, as completely as their love.
Thus, timid and daring at once, we feel so at liberty with our
Heavenly Father, that it seems to us, in our weak way of con-
ceiving things, as if we were more at home with Him than with
the Word or the Holy Spirit. The Word has to be veiled
in flesh that He may not frighten us with His splendour,
and then the Father will take us by the hand and teach us
the Word. The Holy Ghost is inexpressibly dear to us ; but
we are afraid of Him because of the possibility of the un-
pardonable sin, because of His sharpness with Ananias and
Sapphira, and also because we ourselves know something
of the sensitiveness and jealousy of His grace. Yet the Son
throws His fraternal arms of flesh around us in the embraces
of His love ; and the Holy Spirit is fain to nestle like a dove
in the bosom of our souls. What then must be our feeling
of the tenderness of the Father, to whose justice we dare to
confide ourselves and our eternity, as placidly as if He could
not, if He would, cut off the entail of our eternal inherit-

486 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER,

ancel Words cannot tell what that word says, and sings,
and shows, and works, within our souls, — our Heavenly
Father.

Indulgence is the grace of justice, and it is something
more than mercy. Is indulgence then an Attribute of the
unutterably holy God ? An indulgence infinitely holy, the
indulgence of omnipotence, the indulgence of unspeakable
justice, the indulgence of eternal love, — what can be conceived
more beautiful, more ravishing? Yet this is the Eternal
Father. He, who lives only for Himself, seems to live
exclusively for us. He, who is adorably self-sufficient, only
finds His sufficiency in the poverties of our love. He will
merge all His royalties in the single prerogative of His
Fatherhood. His length, His breadth. His depth, His height,
— all are in His compassionate Paternity. To Himself, as
well as to us, His Paternity is enough. He will take no
mission. He will fill no office. He will exercise no judg-
ment. Pater enim non judicat quemquam ; * the Father
judgeth no one. He will only be to us indulgence, reward,
repose, a Father, a Bosom, a Home. 0 Father ! of all
fathers the most fatherlike ! O uncreated tenderness ! 0
plenitude of paternal fondness ! 0 dearest and most blessed
Person ! so clearly seen yet so adorably invisible, so very
near in love yet so far off in majesty ! how can we praise
Thee but with our silence, how can we love Thee but by the
passionate confession of our impossibility to love Thee
worthily 1 Sweet Babe of Bethlehem ! show us the Father.
It will be enough ; for there is no possible more that we can
crave. It will not be more than enough ; for less will not
content our craving. Simply, as St. Philip said. He is
enough, the Father is enough !

Our relationship of brothers to Jesus is very sweet, and has
an independent sweetness of its own. But it also opens our
* St. John T. 22.

I THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 487

way deeper for us into the Paternity of the Father. We are
. more His sons, because we are the brothers of Jesus. He is

lij more our Father on that account. The Sacred Humanity

has glorified us all with its own excellent filiation. As in the
days of Bethlehem the Father imparted the shadows and
rights of His blessed paternity mysteriously to Mary and
Joseph, and thus made the region of the Infancy so glorious
and so heaven-like, in like manner now He will not leave us
without similar consolations. He imparts them to His
priests in their relationship to our souls, and above all in
respect to the Blessed Sacrament It is part of our Father's
love that, inside the pale of the Church, earth should be one
perpetual, and even ubiquitous, Bethlehem. The Infant
Jesus, the joy of the Father and our joy, is for ever there,
and in Him the Father declared, with rare expletive, that
He was well pleased.* Still on the altar and in the taber-
nacle the Babe of Bethlehem is increasing the glory of the
Father. Still is He giving breadth and space to His Father's
love by the multitude of the redeemed. Still is He furnish-
ing His Father with new opportunities of communicating
His Paternity to new children and in new graces. Still is
the novelty of the service and the love which the Father
received from the Babe of Bethlehem as new as ever, if not
more wonderfully new, upon the altar. Still is every Mass
illustrating all the Father's perfections in that work of His
predilection, the work of abbreviating His long, eternally
spoken, and unbrokenly uttered Word. By the Father's
love we live in Bethlehem. Little Bethlehemite Calvaries
we find there, whereon love tenderly crucifies us, sparing
more than it punishes, and punishing, not to punish, but
that it may more abundantly reward. To the great Calvary
we never go. The Father laid that only on our Eldest
Brother. It is not for such as we are. Our homes are Beth-
♦ In quo bene complacuL

488 THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER.

lehem and Nazareth. We have our Desert and our Egypt
for seasons ; but only the shadow of Calvary. More than
the shadow of it our Father cannot bear should fall upon us.
How can we say what we feel of this benignity of our Father 1
We will think of Mary, and yet say, that, when a father is
indulgent, he is more indulgent than a mother. Little ones
treat their mother as the authority of rule, and their father
as the authority of dispensation : and mothers are well-pleased
their children should use them so, in order that they may
thus childishly express the love they bear their fathers,
which is all too great for their little words to hold. It is a
mother's noblest joy to watch her child increasing in love of
its father and in its father's love.

It is easy then for us to discern the spirit of devotion to
the Eternal Father. A few words will depict it. It is a
devotion of immense tenderness. Tenderness is its leading
feature. We might almost say that it is all tenderness ; for
no tenderness is truly tender which is not kept pure by fear.
This devotion is at least the fountain of all tenderness in us,
and of all blameless liberty of spirit It is the charter of the
Boul. It is the fulfilling of the significancy of our creation.
It is in itself the most abundant and the most unalloyed
communication of the spirit of Jesus. It is the ultimate
devotion, and so the devotion of devotions, the last point to
which devotion can reach in its upward ascension, that which
is behind and beyond all else except it be devotion to the
mystery of the most Holy Trinity. May we dare to say it 1
It is in human things a sort of reverential imitation of the
love of the Word and the Holy Ghost for the coequal Father
in divine things. Nay, we must dare yet again, it is also
an imitation of the Father Himself, eternally generating the
Son by the knowledge of Himself, and with the Son eternally
breathing out the Holy Ghost as their mutual love ; for it
is in the knowledge and love of Him, and in union with

THE FEET OF THE ETERNAL FATHER. 489

His Son, and with the utterance of the Spirit's voice, that
this devotion consists.

"We have begun with the Bosom of the Father. We have
ended at His Feet. The Bosom and the Feet of the Father
represent all mysteries. Because of the Incarnate Word in
His Bosom, a creation is called into existence, to lie for ever
at His feet. That part of creation, which shares the created
nature of the Incarnate "Word, falls wilfully from the Father's
Feet. Angels who fell, are let to fall, because they did not
share that nature. Men, because they shared it, are brought
back by the man-loving "Word. He, who is in the Bosom,
comes forth, lays Himself at the feet of men, wins their love,
raises them by their own love-extorted permission, and laya
them again, those who will permit Him, in eternal safety at
the Father's Feet. This is the history of creation. So
Creation and Incarnation, which might have been two mys-
teries, but were actually one, are expressed in these seven
wonders of God's world : — An Incarnate "Word in the Father's
Bosom, — A world modelled on Him at the Father's Feet, —
A world sharing the created nature of the "Word who dwelt
in the Father's Bosom, — A world fallen from the Father's
Feet, — A world sought by the Word from the Father's
Bosom, — A world reconquered and laid triumphantly at the
Father's Feet, — The Word re-entered, and dwelling evermore
in His created nature, in the Father's Bosom.

We have done. How unworldly is the spirit of the land
of Bethlehem ! It has led us up into the heights of the
Eternal Word, and down into the depths of His unfathom-
able abasement. There have been joy and sorrow. Tears
have become Blood, and Blood Tears, and then both of them
Smiles. The Crib has glanced into the Cross, and the Cross
melted ofif into the vision of the Crib. Now at length the
Childhood of the Eternal has sweetly cast us back on the
very living fountain of eternity, the First Person of the Most

490 THE FEET OP THE ETERNAL FATHER.

Holy and Undivided Trinity. The Eternal Child and the
Ancient of Days have come together. They are one. The
Babe on Mary's lap, an earthly Mother's lap, has lifted us up
above ourselves, and has borne us swiftly and softly as a
dove's flight, and has laid us and left us in our old home,
now a secure everlasting home, the Feet of our Eternal
Father.

INDEX.

Abandohmikt of Jesui at His

Viirtb, 134, 136
AbbieyUtion of the Word, 487
Abjises, four, of the Soul of Jesus,

3".

Achaz, false reverence of, 301

Adam, how he fell, 26

Adoption, 33

Adoration of Mary, at the Incar-
nation, 70 ; at the Nativity,
148, 342 ; its universality, 157 ;
offered in the name ef all crea-
tures, 159

Age of S. Joseph, X43, note

Agonies of Jesus, 376, 400

Alban, S., 49

Aloysius, S., 48a

Amicus, 231, 316

Ancient of days, 490

Anna, 209 ; a type of hidden souls,
214 ; characteristic of her devo-
tion, 215

Angels, creation of, 7, 19, 43, 57 ;
their love of God, 30 ; irremedi-
able fall of, 41 ; during the Nati-
vity, 113; their joy at the birth
of Jesus in Bethlehem, 149 ; their
worship compared with that of
Mary, 154 ; a tjf pe of devotion to
the Sacred Infancy, 192 ; source
of their perseverance, 193 ; joy at
the Nativity, 195 ; their adora-
tion of the Incarnate Word, 437 ;
subjects of Mary, 438

Annunciation, the, 67

Antony, S., of Padua, 169

Apostles, the, 477 ; devotion of, to
the Eternal Father, 478

Apostolate of sorrow, 341

Alt, Christian, 189 ; a theology and

a worship, 222; a revelation,

223 ; symbolized in S. Luke, 224;

failure of, 328
Aristotle, his services to theology,

279
Ascension, the, 370
Asceticism, 135
Atonement, the, 333
Attachment to creatures, 179
Attraction of special devotions,

229 ; importance of, 232
Attributes of God, 230; methods

of devotion to, 237, 239, 241 ; the

nameless, 262
Augustine, S. 49
Aztecs, the, 343

Bartoli, 483

Barry's Annie Saincte, 481

Beasts, the, in the Cave of Bethle-
hem, 128

Beatitude of God, 409, 411

Beauty of God, 300 ; partial disclo-
sures of, 128 ; a distinct Attribute,
278 ; of the Incarnate Word, 272 ;
of the Body of Jesus, 328

Beatitudes, eight, of the Son, 412,
418

Beds of the Saints, 49

Bernal, 22, 312

BeruUe, Card. 482

Bethlehem, on the eve of the Nati-
vity, 102, 106 ; had no room for
Jesus, 107; perpetuity of, 163 ;
power of, 107 ; the predilection
of the angels, 196 ; sorrow of,
340 ; compared with Calvary,
373 ; the cross of S. Joseph,
403

492

INDEX.

Biography, 227
Blasphemers, prayer for, 275
Blood, the Precious, first shedding

of, 122, 344; power of, 330; of

the Circumcision, 380
Birth of the Son, 9; in time, 146,

176
Body of Jesus, 31 ; creation of,

325 ; has its own immediate
union with the "Word, 325 ;
entitled to a separate worship,

326 ; prepared for suffering, 327 ;
beauty of, 328 ; likeness of, to
Mary, 328 ; in the Blessed Sacra-
ment, 331 ; capacities of suffer-
ing, 376

Bosom of the Father, 3, 6 ; home
of the Son, 8 ; ever tranquil, 46

Bosom of Mary, 3 ; home of the
"Word, ss, 61 ; life of the Word
in it, 72 ; seat of the Judge of
all, 80, 106 ; joy of the Word in
the, 421

Cajktan, St. 168

Calvary, 366 ; foreshadowed in
Bethlehem, 372

Canonization, 312 ; of silent men,
382

Cardenas, 312

Catherine, St. of Siena, 391

Cave of Bethlehem, no ; its sacred-
ness, 125 ; its contents, 128 ;
cold and dark, 132 ; nine spirits
of devotion belonging to it, 166

Charles Borromeo, S. 229

Childhood, 103, 485

China, 114; its degradation, 115

Choice, the, of God, 29 ; unsucces-
sive, 30

Christmas, a feast of the angels,
194 ; familiar joys of, 456

Church, the, life of, 75 ; present
to the soul of Mary, 92; sympathy
with the vicissitudes of, the fifth
inward penance of the Sacred
Infancy, 389 ; foreseen by Jesus,

474

Circumcision, the, the fifth pen-
ance of Jesus, 380

Coequality of the three Persons, 415

Columbus, 363

Gold, the second penance of Jeius,
377

Coldness, the, of the Oave of
Bethlehem, 132

Communicativeness of Grod, 187,
311

Comprehensor, 400

Conception, the Immaoolate, 58,
82

Condren, F. 230, 482

Continuity of pains, the eighth in-
ward penance of the Sacred In-
fancy, 390

Concurrence of God, 44

Conversion, a divine work, 256

Cornwall, fief of S. Michael, 60

Correspondence to grace, 174 ; the
grandest grace of Mary, 175

Creatures, two views of, 279 ; dig-
nity of, 281 ; how important to
God, 283 ; a distinct disclosure
of the beauty of God, 284

Creation, of the angels, 6, 19, 43 ;
of the earth, 7, 19, 43 ; a free act
of God, 19 ; beginning of, 20 ; a
divine word, 21 ; a step towards
Jesus, 133 ; its reception of
Jesus, 148 ; its relation to God,
253, 261 ; reveals God, 277 ; two
Christian views of, 279 ; danger
of low views about, 287 ; order
of, 297 ; an outflow of joy, 418

Crib, the, and the Cross, 186,
368 ; contrast between them,
368 ; identity between them,
369; produce the same spirit
of devotion, 374

Crucifixion, the, 362

Darkness, the, of the Cave of

Bethlehem, 132
Deathbeds, 257
Decrees, the divine, 119, 425
Deicide, 385

Deification of the creature, 448
Delicacy of the body of Jesus, the
ninth penance of the Sacred In-
fancy, 383
Deny's, St., vision of Mary, 60
Dereliction, the, on the cross, 465
Desert, the Flight through the, 266,

345
Detachment from creatures, 179;

of the three kings, 206
Devotion, what it is, 448
Devotion to the Sacred Infancy,

INDEX.

493

i66, i68— to the Pas«ion, 168 ;
to the Sacred Humanity, how it
differs from others, 176 — never
yet explored, 240 ; cannot be too
minute, 300; to the Passion,
never to be disregarded, 183 ;
to the angels, 191 ; to the Precious
Blood, 224 ; to the Attributes of
God, 171, 230 ; characteristics of
it, 240 ; to the Incarnation, 236 ;
should be joined to a love of the
Divine Person, 264 ; to the Holy
Trinity, 405 ; to the Eternal
Father, 455, 468, 474; to the
apostles, 477 ; to St. Joseph,
482.

Disappointments, 354

Disputation, the, in the temple,

364
Divinity of Jesus, revealed by the

Father, 455, 467
Dolours of Mary, 91
Durandus, 23

Eabth, the chosen home of Jesus,

34

Edward, St., 49

Egypt, flight into, 266, 345

Eight Lives in Jesus, 242; differ-
ently regarded by different
persons, 244

Election, 35

Elements, the, causes of suffering
to the Infant Jesus, 377

Elements of matter, 127

Elias, 188; hidden till the last
days, 191

Elizabeth in Hebron, 84

End of man, 17, 22, 63

England, its past and present state
contrasted, 49

Epochs, three, in the life of God,
248

Essence, the divine, 253

Eternity of God, 249, 250

Eucharist, presence of Christ in
the, 26

Evil, permission of, 35

Exodus, the, 353

Expectation of Mary, 89 ; a mystery
of joy, 93 — of the highest spiritual
perfections, 97 > » *yP« of all
Christian life, 98 ; not uncheo-
quered gladaew, 371

Faob of God, 93; longed for by
men, 94 ; of the Incarnate Word,
95 ; a likeness of Mary, 96 ; seen
by Mary, 140, 152 ; beauty of, i6i

Facility, of the divine operations,
308

Faith of the three kings, 205; in
the Divinity of Jesus, 273

Father, the Eternal, devotion to,
455 ; manifestations of, 462 ;
unites Nazareth and Calvary,
463 ; of Mary, 474 ; of Joseph,
475 ; of the apostles, 479 ; grounds
of, 483 ; spirit of, 488

Fault, the happy, of Adam, 441

Fear, the seventh penance of the
Sacred Infancy, 382

Fecundity of the Holy Ghost, 332 ;
of the Father, 411

Filiation of Jesus, 22 ; reflected in
the relationship of Mary to the
Father, 56 ; glory of the, 321 ;
abysfe of uncreated exultation,
413 ; without subordination, 460 ;
how shared by Mary, 474

Finding the, in the temple, 365

Flight, the, into Egypt, 266, 345

Francis, S., of Sales, invoked the
Holy Innocents when dying, 217

Frankfort, Council of, 23

Gabriel, S., the angel of Incarna-
tion, 68, 194

Generation, eternal, of the Son, 8,
9, 41, 45, 46, 47, 53, 147, 154, 238,
252, 417, 439, 454, 472, 483;
necessary, 19, 418 ; the illimit-
able joy of the Divine under-
standing, 411

Geology, 65, 284, 296

Gertrude, S., 274

Ghost, the Holy, 15; limit of the
Godhead, n, 24, 412 ; fecundity
of, 332 ; the sin against, 453, 485.

Glory, accidental, of God, 283 ; of
the Sacred Humanity in heaven,
307 ; essential, 445

Gloria in Exceliu, 196, 352

Glory, of the Soul of Jesus, 318 ;
beatific, 319; exemplary, 319;
sovereign, 320 ; of filiation, 321.

Good, hidden, 212

God, simple, 14, 230, 409 ; is blis*,
409

494

INDEX.

Goethe, 431

Gojos, Sister Benigne, 230

Gospels the, methods of reading,

452
Grace, suddea in its operations, 28 ;

works of, 99 ; an impulse of the

divine will, 256 ; of union, 311 ;

of the Soul of Jesus, 312 ; un-

growing, 321, 373
Grandeurs of Jesus, i
Gratitude, 81
Growth of children, 356

Headship of Jesus, 296; what

arises from the, 313
Heart of Jesus, 329 ; joy of, 408

master devotion of, 474
Heaven, glories of, 39 ; on the eve

of the Nativity, 120
Heliopolis, 349; inhabitants of,

350
Hell, on the eve of Nativity, 123
Heresy about our Lord, 275
Hierarchy of the Incarnation, 126 ;

of the Church, 347
Holiness, of Mary,;78 ; of St. Joseph,

81 ; our possibilities of, 173
Home, the created, of the Word,

54

Hugh of S. Victor, 316

Humanity, the Sacred, influence of
in creation, 287 ; the light in
which the Vision is seen, 289 ;
the adequate worship of the
Trinity, 289 ; fountain of all
grace, 290 ; its influence on
human thought and policies, 291,
292 ; the safeguard of the world,
292 ; head of the angels, 298 ;
the primal creature of God, 297 ;
the way to God, 302 ; in the
transfiguration, 305 ; in heaven,

307
Humanity, devotion to the Sacred,

172, 231
Humiliations of Jesus, 75
Humility, of Mary, 175 ; first fruits

of, 177 ; of St. Joseph, 180, 185 ;

compared with simplicity, 198 ;

safeguard against delusion, 236 ;
Hurtado, 23, 311
Hypostatic Union, 170

Ideft of Jesus and Mary, 56

Idols of Heliopolii, broken, 349
Idolatry of science, 84
Ignatius, S., 229, 483
Ignominies of the Incarnate "Word,

30

Immortification, 137

Impatience of Jesus for His Passion,

443 .

Incarnation, the, conveniences of,
21 ; remedial character of, 25 ;
lies at the bottom of all sciences,
48 ; time of, how merited by
Mary, 60 ; humiliating circum-
stances of, 119 ; reveals the in-
finity of God, 165 ; the probation
of the angels, 194; the most
profitable devotion to, 236 ; end
of a glorious, 464

Indulgence, the grace of justice,
486

Infancy, the Sacred, 3 ; the foun-
tain of all creation, 4 ; devotion
to, 167 ; a passion of itself, 374 ;
penances of, 275 ; joys of, 399 ;
a continuous fountain, 463

Infants baptized, intuition of, 259 ;
their state of glory, 320

Infinity of God, 13

Ingratitude of men, the sight of,
the fourth inward penance of the
Sacred Infancy, 387

Innocents, the Holy, 216 ; first
martyrs, 217 ; had the full use
of reason, 216 ; their power at
deathbeds, ai8 ; their resurrec-
tion and ascension, 218 ; their
mission, 219 ; types of devotion
to the Sacred Infancy, 219.

Innascibility, 24

Inspirations, 247

Insensibility of the world, iii

Intercession of Mary, 60

Invisibility of God, 65

Izquierdo, 231

Jane, V. of the Cross, 367
Jeremias, his sinless birth, 83
Jesus, the first creature, 27 ; re-
fused hospitality in Bethlehem,
107; His joy in that refusal,
no ; likeness of, to His Mother,
266 ; sleeping, 268 ; in poverty,
270 ; His fiist word, 351 ; on the
buiki of the Nile, 353 ; in th«

INDEX.

495

carpenter's shop, 357 ; reyerenced
in Nazareth, 358 ; a mendicant,
364 ; joy of, 401 ; His love of
sinners, 440 ; devotion of, 449

John, S. the Baptist, 83 ; his sin-
less birth, 83 ; a type of devotion
to the Infant Jesus, 187 ; the
first convert of Jesus, 188; at-
traction to, a way to Jesus,
190

John, S. devotion of, to the Eternal
Father, 480

John, S. of Beverley, 49

John, S. of the Cross, 229

John, B. of Fiesole, 222

Joseph S. , doctor of the Sacred In-
fancy, 5 ; his death, 37 ; influence
of, in the Church, 81 ; his sinless
birth, 83 ; image of the Eternal
Father, 92, 126, 142 ; silence of,
loi, 184 ; singular sanctity of,
142 ; age of, 143 ; his adoration
of the Infant Jesus, 159 ; type
of devotion to the Sacred In-
fancy, 181 ; his death a martyr-
dom, 184 ; his official relation
to the Infant Jesus, 186 ; ob-
scurity of his early life, 197 ;
carries God in his arms, 346 ;
teaches God, 358 ; in the temple
at the presentation, 360; felt
mystically the pains of the
passion, 367 ; cross of, 402 ; joy
of, 420 ; gradual discovery of his
sanctity, 435 ; his love of the
Infant Jesus, 436 ; his devotion
to the Eternal Father, 475 ; his
love of Mary, 477

Joy, the original intent of creation,
179, 418 ; of Mary in the nativity,
177, 406; underlies all sorrow,
395, 399 ; effects of, 399 ; gift of
the Holy Ghost, 399 ; of Jesus,
401 ; from the Eternal Word,
418 ; of the Word in the Sacred
Humanity, 419 ; in the Bosom of
Mary, 421 ; of the Word asleep,
423 ; of being in a state of grace,
429 ; of the angels in their
adoration of Jesus, 438 ; of the
Father's glory, 446

Joys of the Incarnate Word, adora-
tion of Ood, 421 ; in the deoreea

of BKs Divine Person regarding
creation, 422; delight m His
Sacred Humanity, 425 ; of His
Human nature in His Divinity,
427 ; fountain of holiness and
merit, 430; His love of Mary,
431 ; in St. Joseph, 435 ; the
worship of the angels, 437 ; in
the grandeur of man, 438 ; in the
foreseen love of men for Him,
441 ; in the foresight of His
Passion, 443 ; in being the
Saviour, 444

Joyousness of heart, 397

Jubilee of God, 15, 24, 412, 417

Justice, slow, 28

Justice of God, the view of the, the
second inward penance of the
Sacred Infancy, 318

Justification, 333

KiNQDOM of grace, 334; of Jesus,

520

Kings, the three, 202, 379 ; repre-
sentatives of the heathen world,
203 ; simplicity of, 204 ; charac-
teristic of their devotion, 205 ;
their oblations in the Cave of
Bethlehem, 207, 344

Knowledge, of Jesus, 221 ; fulness
of, 314 ; infused, 315 ; acquired,
3^7

Lanoisius, 230

Land, the Holy, 353

Lateran, council of, 19

Law, its source, 254

Learning, 204

Lezana, 231

Liberty of spirit, 45

Life of God, 16, 241 ; modes of
meditating on the, 242 ; divisions
of, 246 ; the secret out of sight,
249 ; in the Vision, 250 ; seen
by faith, 251 ; affected by crea-
tures, 253 ; in the material world,
255 ; in the moral world, 255 ; in
the intellectual world, 255 ; in
the world of grace, 256 ; in the
world of glory, 257; in His
government, 257 ; in punish-
ment, 258 ; in rewarding, 259 ;
in creation, 259; ia humanity,

496

INDEX.

359 ; in indiridual lonls, 260 ; a
life imitable, 261 ; not imitable,
261 ; unimaginable, 262
Life of the Word, in the Bosom of
the Father, 9 ; an infinite com-
placenoy, 13 ; a life of love, 14 ;
creatureless, 12, 18, 42 ; a life of
elections, 29 ; tranquillity of, 42 ;
without change, 44 ; in the bosom
of Mary, 72 ; a life oblation, 73 ;
of silence, 74 ; of weakness, 75 ;
of poverty, 76; its occupations,

77

Light, of prayer, 212 ; the peculiar
outpouring of the Second Person,
419

Likeness unto God, 104

Limbus, i — on the eve of the Nati-
vity, 122

Limit of the Godhead, 11, 24, 443

Literature, emptiness of, 76

Loretto, 66, 303

Loss, the Three days, 363

Love of God and love of men, 179 ;
of Joseph and Mary, 403 ; of
God, 410 ; fraternal, 426 ; filial,
433 ; maternal, 472

Luke, St. type of devotion to the
Sacred Infancy, 221 ; Evangelist
of the Sacred Infancy, 222 ; cha-
racteristics of his Gospel, 224 ;
companion of St. Paul, 225 ; In
the cave of Bethlehem, 226

Lutgarde, S. 483

Maobdo, 439

Magnificat, the, 84

Man, the spiritual, 228, 232

Manger, the, 131

Maria, Raffaello, 403

Mary of Agreda, 27, 87, 353, 364,
367, 426, 436

Mary Magdalene, St., of Pazzi, 274,
460

Mary, predestination of, 32, 55 ; her
nearness unto God, 52, 62 ;
Spouse of the Holy Ghost, 56 ;
her place in the decrees of God,
56 ; her graces, 58 ; merits the
time of the incarnation, 60 ; a
revelation of God, 61 ; her occu-
pation when the Angel visited
her, 67 ; her consent to the In*
eamation, 69 ; horsanctifioation,

78 ; her life during the Nine
Months, 85, 87 ; her silence, 89 ;
like her Son, 96 ; her dignity,
98 ; unknown at Bethlehem, 125 ;
her poverty, 138 ; on the eve of
the Nativity, 139 ; beholds the
Face of God, 140 ; her worship
of her new-born Son, 148 ; char-
acter of that worship, 154 ; its
universality, 157 ; the first type
of devotion to the Sacred In-
fancy, 173 ; her joy in the Nati-
vity, 177 ; her humility, 175 ;
her simplicity, 180 ; her vision
of the interior life of the Infant
Jesus, 393 ; the fountain of joy
to the whole earth, 403 ; her
love of her Son, 433, 473 ; her
rank, 458 ; the knowledge of her
is to increase, 459 ; her virginity
a worship of the Father, 461;
her devotion to the Eternal
Father, 471, 474 ; entered more
than any other mere creature
into the inward dispositions of
God, 472

Margaret of Beaune, 169, 447 ; her
vision of the Holy Child, 274

Massacre of the Holy Innocents,
380; a type of devotion to the
Sacred Infancy, 216

Maternity of Mary, 407; part of
her religion, 471

Meditation on the Life of God, 343,
247

Mechtildis. S., 483

Melancholy, 200

Men, solar and lunar, 335

Mendicancy of Jesus, 364, 378

Mendoza, 87

Meratius, 312

Merits of Jesus, 37

Michael, S., guardian of the Sacred
Humanity, 195

Ministry of Jesus, from the begin-
ning, 6

Mission of the Divine Persons, 27

Missions, of men, 214

Monroy, F. Ferdinand, 483

Montfort, Grignon de, 459

Morality, principles of, immutable,
261

Mortification of Jesui at Hia birib^
134, 137

Mother of Jaias, 33, 356

INDEX.

497

Mysteries of Jesns, four elements

of the, 264
Mysteries of Mary, 150; of the

Sacred Infancy, 405, 408 ; of the

Blessed Trinity, 414

Nativitt, the, condition of the
world at, no; manner of, 140,

14s
Nature, created, assnmption of,

ax ; the road to Creation, 21 ;

incongruous in the Father and

Holy Ohost, 23; congruous in

the Son, 24; the work of the

whole Trinity, 25
Kazarenes, evil spoken, 66, 184.
Nazareth, holy house of, 65, 303 ;

silence of, 75 ; life of Jesus in,

303
Necessities of the diyine life, 11,

29
Neglect, the fourth penance of the

Infant Jesus, 379
Nicquetus, Honoratus, 68
Nieremberg, 312
Night of the Nativity, 117
Nile, the, ^52
Nine months, the, 77, 84, 366 ; life

of Mary during, 85 ; joys of, 88 ;

special grace of, 15a
Nouet, 483
Nunc dimittis, an

Obedience of Jesus, 100 ; source of

His inward penance, 392 ; to the

Eternal Father, 456, 466; to

Mary, 465
Oblation of the life of Jesus, 73
Obscurity, of God's ways, 65 ; of

the life of the Word Incarnate,

74
Occupations of Jesus in the Bosom

of Mary, 78
Omnipresence of God, 131
Oneness with the Father, 458,

469
Operations of God, slow, 63
Optimism of divine works, 310
Oracles, disturbed at the Nativity,

in
Orphanhood, 462
Overflow of God's love, 53
Osmund, S., of Salisbury, 49

Pain, possibilities of, 427

Palafox, 478

Palm Sunday, 371

Pantheism, 246

Passion, the, two modes of contem<
plating, present to the mind of
the Infant Jesus, 359 ; begun at
Bethlehem, 369; the foresight
of, the third inward penance of
the Sacred Infancy, 387

Paternity, the divine, 473, 484

Patience, devotion to the divine,
230; ninth inward penance of
the Sacred Infancy, 392

Paul B. of the Cross, 232

Paul, S., devotion of, to the Eternal
Father, 480

Peter, St., his love of Jesus, 30 ; his
devotion to the Eternal Father,
479

Penaflel, 312

Penances, outward, of the Sacred
Infancy, 375 ; tears, 377 ; cold,
377 ; poverty, 377 ; neglect, 379 ;
the circumcision, 380 ^ weariness,
381 ; fear, 382 ; siL nee, 382 ; the
extreme delicacy of the Body of
Jesus, 383 ; the inward penances,
the sight of human sins, 384 ; of
God's justice, 386 ; the foresight
of the passion, 387 ; the foresight
of man's ingratitude, 388 ; view
of the sufferings of those dear to
Him, 388; sympathy with the
vicissitudes of the Church, 389 ;
sight of Christians in hell, 389 ;
continuity of suffering, 390; clear
appreciation of all, 390

Perfections of God, 13; devotion
to, 171, 230, 239

Phantom bells, 233

Places, the Holy, 357

Plenitudes of the Soul of Jesus ; - -
of nature, 311 ; of grace,i3ii ; of
science, 314; of glory, 313

Philanthropy, 380

Philip S. Ap. , 468 ; devotion of, to
the Eternal Father, 480

Philip St., Neri, 229; apostle of
Rome, 478

Philosophies, emptiness of, 76

Pictures, devotional, 189 ; undevo*
tional, 222

Planets, the inhabitation of, 295

Plato, his services to theology, 279

a I

498

INDEX.

Polo, Marco, 234

Poverty of the Incarnate Word, 76,
i34» 136, 270 ; the third penance
of Jesus, S77 ; of religious orders,

379
Prayer, light of, 212
Predestination of Jesus, 27, 42 ; of

Mary, 32, 55, 106
Predilection of God, 29
Presentation, the, a type of devo-
tion to the Sacred Infancy, 308 ;

mystery of, 371
Prevision of the Passion, 368 ; the

third inward penance of the

Sacred Infancy, 387
Procession of the Holy Ghost, 9,

43. 45, 46, 47, 54, 147, 254, 238,

252, 417, 421, 483 ; necessary, 19
Progress, 47
Power, worship of, 399
Pulses, of the Unity of God, 15 ; of

the divine life, 41, 424
Purification, the, 209
Purity, of Mary, 141, 430 ; akin to

infinity, 179 ; the gift of joyous

spirits, 180; most dear to God,

429
Purgatory, 99, 319 ; on the eve of

the Nativity, 123

QUABENTANA, 364

Queen of the Angels, zox, 438:

longed for by the angels, 193 ; of

joys, 406
Questions, open, 295

Raphael, St., 194

Reason, use of, in Mary, 59

Redemption, an overflow of joy,
418 ; necessitated suffering, 427

Rejection of Jesus at His birth,
134 ; guilt of it, 135

Renty, M. de, 169

Reservation of the Blessed Sacra-
ment in Heaven, 265

Reserve of God, 186

Resurrection, mystery of the, 323

Richard, St., of Chichester, 49.

Rigoleuc, 2

Saobament, the Blessed, reserva-
tion of, in heaven, 267

Saints, prayers of the, 116 ; lives of'

429 ; diversities of, 434
Salutation, the angelic, 68, 193
Salvation, the work of Jesus alone,

444

Schism, why so blighted, 351

Sciences, physical, attractions of,
86 ; revelations of Ooe, 354 ;
importance of studying them,
279, 286 ; must grow, 287 ; pre-
sent to the soul of Jesui, 317

Secrecy of the Birth of Jesus, 134,
136.

Secret life of God, 249.

Self, worship of, 178.

Self-seekiog, wherein coniiiti its
offensiveness, 283.

Seraphs, 53.

Seven joys of Mary, 407.

Shadows, divine, 476.

Shepherds, the, of Bethlehem, 194,
379 > * ^ypo o^ devotion to the
Sacred Infancy, 197 ; their wor-
ship, 199, 344: first apostles of
the Sacred Infancy, aoo; their
obscurity, 202.

Silence of Jesus, 75, 458; eighth
penance of the Sacred Infancy,

383.

Simplicity of God, 14, 230, 409;
the foundation of devotion to
the Attributes, 244 ; His bliss,
409

Simplicity, of Mary, x8o; of the
shepherds, 198 ; a permanent
childhood, 20Z ; of the three
kings, 204.

Simeon, 208 ; characteristic of his
devotion, 209, 2x5; sees God
Incarnate, 211 ; jtype of hidden
souls, 213 ; his waiting for Christ,
403-

Sin against the Holy Ghost, 425,

485.
Sin, the vision of human, the first

inward penance of the Sacred

Infancy, 383,
Singularity to bo distrusted, X82.
Siuri, 87
Sleep of God, 258, 346 ; wonders

of the, 381.
Solitude, the threefold, 333.
Soul of Jesus, 31 ; glory of, 39,

S3 ; loveliness, of 309 ; had the
atifio vision, 315; infused

INDEX.

499

seienee of, 316 ; worth of, 322 ;
appropriate creation of the Holy
Ghost, 323 ; ocean of created
worship, 422

Sorrow, 335 ; teaches some men all
things, 336 ; does in some the
work of grace, 338 ; the sister
of joy, 396

Space, 249, 309

Star of Bethlehem, 203

States of the Sacrtd Infancy, 390

Straw, the, in the manger, 131

Suarez, 23 ; thinks our Lord made
a vow of obedience at the Incar-
nation, 462

Subordination, none in the Eternal
Filiation, 461

Suffering, 99

Super-facility, 308

" Superlatires," 426

Sweating of blood, 369

Taulxb, 460

Teaching, the leoret, of onr Lord,

„47o

Tears the first penance of Jesus,

377
Temptation, the, 363.
Term of the Godhead, it, 24, 4x2
Theology, the interpreter of all

■oiences, 86 ; of the Angels, 191 ;

the Scotist, 278
Things, divine, effects of, 151
Thirst of Jesus, 238
Thirty-Three Years, 464, 470 ; mys-
teries of the, 2, 150; never

fathomed, 166
Tierra del Fuego, 339
Time, creation of, 12
Thomas, St., 23, 316, 462
Thomas, S., of Canterbury 49
Thomas, St., of Hereford, 49
Tranquillity of God, 146
Transfiguration, the, 305
Trinity, the, 9, 12 ; devotion to,

405 ; the earthly, 127, 145, 264,

430, 460, 476

Unbzldey, changes of its form, 278.

Unforgivingness, 261

Union, the Hypostatic, 170, 302 ;

necessity of realising it for true

devotion, 450

Unity of the Godhead, 416
Unquietness lulled by sorrow, 339
Unreality in religion, 109
Unselfishness, 220
Usage of the faithful, 408
Utterance of the Father, 10 ; eter-
nal, II

Vaoukness in religion, 275
Vasquei, 23 ; on the merits of Jesus,
38 ; on His infused science, 316
Vega, 87
Verbum Caro factum est, jS, 273,

„ 274, 335

Viator, 401

Vicissitudes of the Church, sympa-
thy with the, the sixth inward
penance of the Sacred Infancy,
389

View, the, of human sins, the first
inward penance of the Sacred In-
fancy, 384

Views of God, 410

Vincent Ferrer, S. 459

Virginity of our Lady a worship of
the Father, 461

Vision of God, 40, 46; transiently
granted to Mary, 88 ; transient,
94 ; beatific, 253, 421 ; present
to the Soul of Jesus, 315, 429

Vocation, the highest, 182 ; of every
man, 232

Voice of the wilderness, 233, 345

Volcanic characters, 339

Vow of Jesus at the Incarnation
462

Watwabdnkss, apparent, in the
life of our Lord, 455

"Weakness, of the Incarnate Word,
75; the sixth penance of the
Sacred Infancy, 381

Wilderness, voices of the, 234, 346

Wilfrid, S. 49

WiUiam, S. of York, 50

Will of Mary, 301

Will of the Father, 456

Wonders, seven, of God's world,
489

Word, the, 8 ; in the Bosom of the
Father, ' 12 ; connection of, with
creatures, 21 ; the first creature,
27 ; predUections of, 28 ; joys of,
40 J cause of all creation, 47,

500

INDEX.

287 ; made flcBb, 70 ; goremsthe
universe, 79 ; speechless in Beth*
lehem, 155; joy of, 409, 41a,
419 ; the wisdom of the Qodhead,

41S, 417, 457
"World, the, during the Nativity,

106; of Rome, 112; of Greece,

112; of Judea, 113; of China,

114 ; of barbarians, 115
Worldliness, 281, 400
"Worlds, plurality of, 296
Works of God outside Himself, the

work of the whole Trinity, 25,

42, 461 ; perfect, 33 ; effects of

obeerying them, X05

"Worship of Jeans, 70, 121 ; In the
Bosom of Mary, 78 ; in the temple
at twelve years old, 362 ; in the
Sacred Humanity, 422

"Wounds, the Five, 332

"Wulstan, S. 50

TsABimro of Mary for the Face of
God, 94; of Jesus for men,
388

Tears, the thirty-three, mysteries
of, 2 ; present to the mind of
Mary, 91 ; the Eighteen, of Nasa*
r«th,3SS

THB END.

PRINTED BY XHE GARDEN CItY PRESS WD., WTCHWORTH, HERW.

BQT
843
.F19

Faber, Frederick William,
1863.
Bethlehem. —

1814-